Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

A lot of people are bringing up Wirth's law or other things, but I want to get more specific.

Has anyone else noticed how bad sign-on redirect flows have gotten in the past ~5 years?

It used to be you clicked sign in, and then you were redirected to a login page. Now I typically see my browser go through 4+ redirects, stuck at a white screen for 10-60 seconds.

I'm a systems C++ developer and I know nothing about webdev. Can someone _please_ fill me in on what's going on here and how every single website has this new slowness?

OMG Yes. At my megacorp I work at they have this internal HR/401k site thing. I think it goes through 30+ redirects to get anywhere. It's INSANE. We have something called "Pitstop" and clicking on the list of tickets takes 30s+ to load.

My record is Jira successfully loading a page in around 8 minutes. It seriously sat on a white screen for 8 minutes, then boom there's the page - no interaction or F5. What on earth could it have been doing for that long??