Comment by bitpush

You're right, but that's not the point the person is making is it? A bare modern webpage is no where comparable to the site of the past. If you take hackernews as an example with no ads, no tracking as an example, it still be orders of maginitude _costly_ than index.html in the past.

Hacker News is dynamic, a webserver has to dynamic stitch together the comments and send you an html. It has to make sure the page is always fresh with latest comments, and vote count. There's batch processing happening in the background, with multiple rounds of storage and backup.

So yes, to the user it is "Please give me the homepage" and "Here ya go" but behind the scenes it is expensive, at this scale.