Interesting take on it. Few things I would like to point out.

1. The bad comparisons

If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita... Here is an instructional article on Best Practices for Increasing Online performance that is 3.1 MB long.

The comparisons between raw text and stylized websites is just silly. If you take just the text and pictures of the article he links for the 3.1 MB and put it in a word file, they are just over 1MB. If you take out the images it's only 24 KB. Guess what, if you have a website that is capable of displaying the text of "The Master and Margarita" with the font and page it was printed it, with picture covers and any artwork it may contain, it's gonna be a lot larger than its raw text.

2. Why is this really a problem if it's larger than his magical 1.8MB?

Sure, webpages have been getting bigger but average web speed has been increasing at an even higher rate. And really, most of the internet bandwidth is now specifically for netflix, which is roughly 3.2 cubic shittons larger bandwidth needs than most other websites.

3. What percentage of the increased web page usage are actually bloat and not just better quality content?

I agree it seems webpages are getting worse, but I haven't seen any research done into this area nor see any linked to in the article. Also the 'bloat' he talks about with 'poor web design', guess what, that's cached. So when you have to load it next time, you don't re-download it.

4. To me there is an inference that web pages should be smaller, due to stuff like phones and tables. However, those devices now have as high or higher screen resolution than most people's desktops.

5. A simple web is a boring web

I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible. Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome.

I personally thing the swath of varying types of website is what keeps the internet truly interesting. I can play FPSs in my browser, get directions and view pictures of all over my country, or see a video that was posted minutes ago on the other side of the world. You have to accept the fact to get to that information you'll need more bandwidth. I think a better approach may be for arguing for a 'low bandwidth' option for sites. Sites like youtube are already designed in mind for different bandwidth needs, could be nice for other sites to adopt that tactic.