The article is about 1 MB as transferred; essentially all of that is composed of the images (the HTML itself is small at ~23.3 kB uncompressed, and the page loads no other resources).
The Hacker News homepage, when I tested it, transferred about 13.1 kB.
There is a lot of images and 1mb, by the exacting standards of the author is a (little) bit big i think. Also, the page seems to be a bit....boring? Static images are unexciting especially the stock ones the author uses. Not only that, but the text seems to be unnecessarily narrow and long. I do think a case could be made for so- called "bloated" webpages.
The Hacker News homepage, when I tested it, transferred about 13.1 kB.