The homepage for my blog is apparently 9.95kB, which includes all styles, some JS, and the content. There is an additional 22kB font file that breaks the rule, but when I first designed the site I used built-in browser fonts only, and it looked fine. There are no images on the homepage apart from a couple of inlined SVG icons in the footer.
Looking at the posts themselves, they vary in size but the content/styles/JS probably average around 14kB. You've also got the font file, but again a more minimal site could strip that. Finally, each post has a cover image that makes up the bulk of the content size. I don't think you're ever going to get that under 14kB, but they're also very easy to load asynchronously, and with a CSS-rendered blur hash placeholder, you could have an initial page load that looks fairly good where everything not in the initial 14kB can be loaded later without causing FOUCs/page layout shifts/etc.
For a magazine site or a marketing site, the 14kB thing is almost certainly impossible, but for blogs or simple marketing pages where the content is more text-based or where there are minimal above-the-fold images, 14kB is pretty viable.
Looking at the posts themselves, they vary in size but the content/styles/JS probably average around 14kB. You've also got the font file, but again a more minimal site could strip that. Finally, each post has a cover image that makes up the bulk of the content size. I don't think you're ever going to get that under 14kB, but they're also very easy to load asynchronously, and with a CSS-rendered blur hash placeholder, you could have an initial page load that looks fairly good where everything not in the initial 14kB can be loaded later without causing FOUCs/page layout shifts/etc.
For a magazine site or a marketing site, the 14kB thing is almost certainly impossible, but for blogs or simple marketing pages where the content is more text-based or where there are minimal above-the-fold images, 14kB is pretty viable.
For reference, my blog is https://jonathan-frere.com/, and you can see a version of it from before I added the custom fonts here: https://34db2c38.blog-8a1.pages.dev/ I think both of these versions are not "spartan minimal academic pages".