This isn't 1983. Worrying about bandwidth, memory, and processing power (in user space) is no longer relevant.
The interwebs is international. And even in the first world, many people have crummy Wi-Fi, and some even dialup still. Then there is the fact that your website gets cached, and that "if everybody thought like you", that cache would only be a fraction as useful (that goes for both browser and proxy caches).
And even on a fast machine with lots of ram and a huge SSD; some people like to have a lot of tabs open, and what might not matter much for a single webpage, does make a difference when you multiply it by 20 or 50. Even if that difference is just "the system has more RAM for the filesystem cache" and shaves off a tenth of a second here and there. This isn't 1983 indeed; assuming a big audience, if you only fail shave off 0.1 unnecessary seconds on average per day per visitor, you can easily waste several cumulative lifetimes, to save yourself a bit of time, or even worse, to save yourself thought. (Sometimes there isn't even a trade-off, it's just the difference between being mindless, and being curious and maybe testing a bit.)
Though I agree that the limit is arbitrary. What matters is how bloated it is; the flabbyness of the whole is the sum of the flabbyness of individual parts. If you implement photoshop or after effects as web app, feel free to weigh 5mb or 50mb for all I care. If it's a to-do list, even 50kb might be way too much.
But as a fun exercise for yourself? Limits are among the most interesting things there are, creatively speaking.
The interwebs is international. And even in the first world, many people have crummy Wi-Fi, and some even dialup still. Then there is the fact that your website gets cached, and that "if everybody thought like you", that cache would only be a fraction as useful (that goes for both browser and proxy caches).
And even on a fast machine with lots of ram and a huge SSD; some people like to have a lot of tabs open, and what might not matter much for a single webpage, does make a difference when you multiply it by 20 or 50. Even if that difference is just "the system has more RAM for the filesystem cache" and shaves off a tenth of a second here and there. This isn't 1983 indeed; assuming a big audience, if you only fail shave off 0.1 unnecessary seconds on average per day per visitor, you can easily waste several cumulative lifetimes, to save yourself a bit of time, or even worse, to save yourself thought. (Sometimes there isn't even a trade-off, it's just the difference between being mindless, and being curious and maybe testing a bit.)
Though I agree that the limit is arbitrary. What matters is how bloated it is; the flabbyness of the whole is the sum of the flabbyness of individual parts. If you implement photoshop or after effects as web app, feel free to weigh 5mb or 50mb for all I care. If it's a to-do list, even 50kb might be way too much.
But as a fun exercise for yourself? Limits are among the most interesting things there are, creatively speaking.