Pasties are English, patties are what happened when they were taken over to Jamaica

It's nothing to do with tracking - that part's actually very quick.

The sluggishness comes from the use of tons of JS, and huge DOM trees.

The JS is there to make the site interactive. Do you want the entire page to reload whenever you post a comment? No? Then you need some JS to make a post request to the server, add the comment to a database, get back an all ok response, and then retrieve that comment to show it to you. Sites with more interactivity will be slower to load, in general.

But that can be mitigated by making the site an SPA, which means a heavier first load, but the entire rest of the time you spend on the site (on the same browser tab), you won't have to load a full new page whenever you go to another part of the site. The JS will reconfigure the page for you. Has many other benefits as well, like making authoring huge, extremely complicated sites a lot easier, faster, and easier to debug.

Users don't temd to have the first clue what goes into making a website. In 2022 web dev is crazily complex, the requirements are just so much higher than they were 20 years ago.