It’s not only shit, it’s incredibly slow. On my Thinkpad T480, the CPU fans immediately turn on and get really loud when browsing on the new Reddit UI. Those of us who knew the internet pre-“web 2.0” know that it’s complete nuts for a website to bring a 4 cores/8 threads CPU to its knees just to render mostly text and a few pics, we’re not even talking about sophisticated content with videos.
The reason is that the new UIs are full of Javascript which does way more than just adding a bunch of effects (which normally even a Pentium 4 should be able to handle with no issues): tracking. They’re doing a bunch of stuff like collecting every few milliseconds the locations where you tap, how long you’re staying on a given page, “eye-tracking” (basically building heatmaps of where you “look” the most on a given web page so that they can decide whether to show some ads there etc…), a bunch of A/B tests for marketing purposes + the associated data collection that is done on your browser etc… and that’s what’s wasting your CPU cycles.