iDad5

Great work as always!
I'm impressed!
You are giving us great tools to do the right things - but it also goes to show, how complex doing 'perfect' web-design/development... has become - especially once you realize that mobile and desktop (while gerat for tutorial explanations) aren't by far the only interesting environments and reduced-motion also has partners in crime with high contrast, dark mode etc...

So thank you for giving us the option, and no thanks for taking away the excuses...

I second every thing you say and would love to point out some other points:

I started wed-dev in 1995 when we really had to count each byte by hand, and I stayed old-school in that regard since then.
Nevertheless I find it somewhat laughable when I hear people arguing about half a kilobyte when we talk JavaScript or CSS Files, while they deliver images upwards of 3MB.

Using image src-sets and carefully compressed images for several screen-sizes and resolutions will often gain you hundreds of kilobytes, going for webp if target permits it might add to this. Wise choices in pre- or lazy loading could use the thoughts wasted on the choice of minifier.

Minifying most of the time isn't worth it in my experience, as all servers send gziped anyhow - I even had situations where not minified files performed better, as gzip was struggling with minified ones. (exotic I admit)
Tree shaking is another thing that in most cases isn't necessary if you carefully consider what you really need upfront and if you refrain from using complex libraries for just one simple functionality. (Don't get me started on that one. Yet.)

Also oftentimes I find it preferable to load a little extra with the front-fage or any other landing page, (like style instructions for following pages inside one slightly larger CSS of an icon-font) as the user usually has to wait for that shiny impressiv frontpage anyhow.  As he has to load everything site related from scratch - a few milliseconds more or less don't make a difference. Once the user moves on our site, she gets a better and more snappy experience with all that is already cached. 

First and foremost the whole fetichism about every single kilobyte in tools like GSAP in my opinion stems from people loading half a million useless and sometimes conflicting libraries under the pretense of 'not reinventing the wheel' while they are actually to lazy (?) to write a little code on their own and learn the basic concepts.
To compensate for their overuse of tools the use more tools to tree shake minify and whatnot them. Ending up with complex websites, complex workflows, thus forever forced to care more for their tools instead of their product.
*old man stops ranting*

That said GSAP is probably the only library I'll use without a second though - it is worth every kilobyte in gold and double that.