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?

I pay my water bill on my phone using cellular data because some part of the sign-in process hits an address that's blocked by the adblock DNS I use.

This is the worst. You can't even click an internal site link anymore without being redirected through several scummy third-party domains, so that some knucklehead product manager can claim that they are tracking "engagement" and show off "metrics" to their upper managers.