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There are some easy optimizations wins for this page but none of the top ones are framework related. Maybe with the faster build times they can easily optimize images and 3rd party dependencies. As someone else pointed out, nearly half that data is unoptimized images.

For the curious, google's current homepage is a 200kb payload all in, or about 50 times smaller.

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Who remembers sprite sheets? Does that give my age away?

I did an optimization pass for a client once where I got rid of a ton of the sprites but didn't have the energy to redo it all, so it just had huge sections that were blank.

Super snappy loading afterwards though.

Yes, good times! With http2/3 they don't really matter anymore though, you get similar benefits from request pipelining.

Spriting is actually harmful for performance except in specific HTTP-1 scenarios.

Doesn't McMaster Carr still use sprites? Is that like the one optimization they managed to get wrong?

Looks like it, but isn't this site famous for being a "classic" storefront?

Some CMSs would auto-generate sprites. If you are showing most of them, it's still a positive, I'd assume. And, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I indeed remember.

HTTP 2+ (supported by every web browser) obviates sprite sheets.

They were a useful hack, but still a hack.