It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.

There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.

it's still engineering, just for different constraints - cost & speed.