did you try text.npr.org or lite.cnn.com;

I assume you are not in the US, since most 2.5g/3g towers have been shut down;

the reason could be bloated client, heavy 3rd party tracking; probably request timeouts might have been tuned to reflect 4g/5g latency/responses to ensure efficient server resource usage.

there is not much you can do with 200kbps these days.

When I pull up the network tab on duckduckgo lite, it shows the site only being 2.74KB, with a result page being 9.11KB.