I'm not gonna lie, if my fat high-res site images make life a lil harder in Vanuatu but convert a bunch of black-turtleneck d-bags in San Francisco to customers, I know which side of the bread the butter is on.
I think thats probably part of the point of the article. I would read it less of a statement like "make you webpages smaller", and read it more as "be aware of the bloat of modern webpages".
If your target audience has great internet, then ignore optimising for size. But be aware that people travel, and your market may change, so what is ok in SF may become unusable if they go on holidays, move offices or need to work of roaming data due to an outage.
Ah, I'm just joking around. Mostly. ;) I agree with and mostly implement the vast majority of google's recommendations vis a vis site weight and speed (when I have time/budget to do so), because I regard making sites fast as a signifier of competent professionalism. Any hack can make a sucky, slow, heavy website. Making a website that really cooks is one of several things I use to justify my rate. ;)
