This is a wonderful example how people live in the inverse-world.
Marketing is in the end a way of trying to get people to listen, even if you have nothing substantial to say (or if you have something to say, potentially multiply the effect of that message). That means you have to invent a lot of packaging and fluff surrounding the thing you want to sell to change peoples impression independent of the actual substance they will encounter.
This to me is entirely backwards. If you want people to listen focus on your content, then make sure it is presented in a way that serves that content. And if we are talking about text, that is really, really small in terms of data and people will be happy if they can access it quickly and without 10 popups in their face.
Not that I accuse any person in this thread of towing that line, but the web as of today seems to be 99% of unneeded crap, with a tiny sprinkle of irrelevant content.
Almost 15,000 elements! I do agree that too many elements can slow a page but from my experience that starts to happen a few hundred thousand elements, at least that's what we'd run into making data visualizations for network topologies (often millions of nodes + edges) but the trick for that was to just render in canvas.
This is true, yet I've seen plenty of poorly built webapps that manage to run slowly even on a top tier development machine. Never mind what all the regular users will get in that case.
The HTML spec page[0] is the proper War and Peace of the web. It is 2,125MB of text gzipped, twice as large as War and Peace. It still makes some browsers weep, as was discussed in an episode of HTTP 203 podcast[1].
You can read the entirety of War and Peace in a single HTML file: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leo-tolstoy/war-and-peace/...
A marketing page, SaaS app landing, etc., will not even begin to approach that size, whether or not you add an extra wrapper around your <a>s.