Well, in a way, yes, especially when using older hardware like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now. Go to the Wayback machine or Internet Archive, find a page from when the machine was made (2004) and compare its loading time to the current version. Now take a recent piece of hardware and load the current page and marvel at the fact that the old page on the old machine loads about as fast as the new page on the new machine. The old page looks dated, of course, but that is more a matter of the layout than it is of the lack of 'modern' technology. It would be possible to make the page look close to the way the modern version looks without incurring all that extra load time. Yes, this would probably entail server side rendering and some judicious use of older but still useful tricks like server side includes but it is certainly doable. It isn't being done because modern pages load fast enough on modern hardware and developers are incentivised to track the latest technologies to keep their market value up.