Interesting, but so many problems and limitation in a data set like this.

The first most obvious one is that sites not getting core updates are likely simpler in design than more modern sites. That a site running TwentyTen rocks CWV has nothing to do with whether it’s running WP 3.6 or 5.8.

This analysis really only makes sense if you control for themes and assume someone hasn’t done something stupid (like they so often do) and added 32 differently sized images to a slider.

The other big problem, which they rightfully identified themselves, is everything is about the root/home page. No one seriously evaluates site performance based on a single page, let alone the single page most likely to be nothing like the other pages of the site.

I get HTTP Archive doesn’t want to be a “full-blown web crawler” but even crawling the first 10 nav menu links would give WAY more meaningful results.

The biggest thing WP needs to do is figure out how to make all the dynamic content on a page AJAX. So dynamic pages can be page cached and a single GraphQL query can pull in the dynamic bits. This is the advantage to things like JAMStack. WP wasn’t architected to be performant in dynamic page scenarios. Heck, it still doesn’t natively lazy load blog post comments!