That is totally fair, but for me, I make internal company apps. They happen to use Javascript, but realistically we could ask someone to download 100mb of a binary, and it would still be an ok situation.
For other devs? I bet they say that people on slow connections are not the target market. After all, a slow line will choke on all the ads used to pay for the site.
Yeah, we definitely care about this more for our external apps than internal ones, but as we grow and our internal users expect more and more sophistication from our internal tool, it's becoming a bigger priority. It really does matter. Think the customer support agent or the sales rep who's on the phone and has to make the customer wait just a few more seconds can have an impact... but it's definitely harder to justify.
> I bet they say that people on slow connections are not the target market
That however... there's a LOT of data showing how every seconds count for things like ecommerce or news websites. And for actual B2B type apps, they likely don't have adds after you are logged in. We're gathering a lot of data on this internally, and customers care a -lot- about perf of things like CMSs, CRMs and other enterprisey apps.
For other devs? I bet they say that people on slow connections are not the target market. After all, a slow line will choke on all the ads used to pay for the site.