What about Netsurf? Have you tried it?

Personally, I’m resisting upgrading to links from lynx.

I remember as a teenager wondering why lynx felt so slow, so I looked into the source code and discovered it was literally calling sleep() while displaying status messages, so I commented that out and made my internet experience Blazingly Fast

That sure brings some memories. They were calling sleep() so you would have time to read the messages in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Back in 1995 or so I submitted patches changing the browser's inner loop to be select() based, with a queue of messages to show for a few seconds each without slowing down browsing. It took one night of hacking, and the maintainers rejected the approach as "too complicated".

oh I just looked into it again for fun and noticed that indeed it defaults to sleeping at least 2 seconds every time you open a URL but this can be changed in lynx.cfg by altering these defaults:

    #INFOSECS:1
    #MESSAGESECS:2
    #ALERTSECS:3

Why would they possibly include this?

Builds character. Delayed gratification.

That and developers often conflate knowing how to construct UIs with how to design UIs. When lynx was first built, the difference in speed probably wasn’t that noticeable and people didn’t have the same expectations for responsiveness, so it didn’t matter, though times quickly changed.

I don’t know about that project specifically, but based on my experience trying to do design work in developer-controlled projects, maintainers and core users often convince themselves that some terrible user-hostile counter-intuitive UI— focused on graphically representing the API to the back end rather than using abstractions to solve the problems users actually want to solve— is the proper UI approach and if it doesn’t fit your use case, the problem is either you or your use case.