My wife has tens of Reddit tabs open on a 5 year old bottom of the line 12” mini MacBook. HN users seem to have a lot of difficulty getting their computers to evaluate JavaScript normally.
It takes a good minute before the site even becomes interactive. If I was logged in it would be even worse with it having to load the text editor thingy etc.
Don't mind me typing "what?" in the search bar there, I thought the close button would just dismiss the bar at the top. Also note that I had uBlock active which blocked some requests. I don't even want to know how long it would take without it.
The render looked fast. Perhaps the buttons have click events intercepted by an analytics library, and the async requests to load analytic libraries have to time out first? Can you network tools the load? I’m not saying the new site is fast or anything but it surely doesn’t take a minute to become interactive in most cases.
Also are you using any dns based blocking like pi holes? Sometimes this can cause a network request to time out rather than instantly fail.
Looks like the reddit servers are just slow, but the old reddit doesn't need to load so many JS files to become usable. Even if it is only halfway loaded you can already interact with it.
Because of the amount of JS files that the new reddit needs, it's not even a contest.
