@ChrisMayLA6

have rubbish broadband connections (or none at all)

The gov.uk team has done phenomenal work to make their infrastructure work well on low bandwidth links. I tried some of their sites using a simulated 28.8 Kb/s link with 2s latency and they were quite usable (TLS handshake was very slow). So I don’t necessarily agree with that part of the criticism (it’s almost certainly true for people not using that infrastructure), but the social aspects are spot on. Especially people not having access to trustworthy client devices.

EDIT: I picked 2s latency because that’s what I got on the first phone I owned that supported Internet access. It used GPRS. There is still one GPRS network active, being paid a lot of money to keep smart meters working, but I don’t think they sell to consumers. Mobile Internet will have both faster speeds and lower latency than I tested, but I wanted to see the worst case. And TLS with multiple round trips for the handshake is really slow on that link.