My mom used to be on rural dialup, with 30Kbps on a good day. Back then (200x) you could access the internet that way. Facebook, Gmail, you name it (Gmail definitely worked better in its basic HTML mode ... RIP). It did take patience but everything worked.

Then things got more modern, and she's on a cellular data plan. Once we ran it out on purpose near the end of the month, to see what the 128Kbps fallback is like. 4x as fast as she used to have, good enough, right?

Nope. Half the web didn't load at all, due to timeouts loading resources and such.

And now people are complaining about falling back to super slow 3G.

But with everything bloated 100x since the 200x's, everything has gotten 100x better, right?

I have a fairly basic, though recent, Android phone (Moto G Play 2023). I use an app called Flashfood. It was crisply performant. Then an update got pushed that made mainly cosmetic changes... and slowed it down by a factor of 10-20. Now it feels glacial on the same phone. Do they care? Maybe they should. The super recent, $1K smartphone crowd may not be exactly the Flashfood crowd. My usage of the app is way down now, because it's just not worth the aggravation.