I was thinking about this though not quite as severe. I would also love to see something like this in the end though. It sucks that as a mobile user I'm paying for analytics, unoptimized images, and poorly-written code when just simple markup and text would do. With the speed at modern networks run server-side processing shouldn't be as taboo.
One reason for a minimal web would be the idea that I could one-day be living on the far end of a rather slow modem as my only Internet connection. Sucking ten tons of Javascript/images/adtech down a link like that would be pretty awful.
Didn't think of it before, but your "server-side" suggestion could minimize some of the pain of that, I guess. Low-bandwidth VNC on the client to a browser that's actually running in a DC somewhere. Maybe a VNC add-on to block/freeze rapidly updating squares (videos, gifs, etc).
Not great, exactly, but would ameliorate some of this.
