Usually I am telling X users they should quit X and start a blog but this is a blog post that would be better on X and better still on Mastodon.

I was on a brief kick of interest in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

which of course eliminates structures like "X is Y" but I realized I could still write stuff like "With utmost evil, evil webmasters minify their evil web sites for evil reasons that make sense only in the evil world view of evil people"

Minification is the "feel good" optimization for frontend (ahem, full-stack nowadays) developers that want to feel like they are doing FAANG-level optimizations.

What would be worthwhile optimisation to do?

For a small/medium site? Optimize images sizes/resolutions & keep the JS dependencies in check to only actually used code, or optimize to get the most important data rendered ASAP are much more important then adding a minifier script in the release pipeline (and I'm assuming gzipping the content is basically done for free everywhere nowadays). All of this especially in the spirit of TFA that encourages people to poke around JS code while browsing websites (as people did in the past with pure HTML)