For anyone thinking that this is an insignificant saving of "only" 32kb, it's really important to remember that many of the site's users will be amongst the poorest in society. Many of them will be accessing it using the oldest, slowest devices; things far slower than the average HN reader's last few phones. Anything that can be done make the site work better for them is worth the effort.
Terence Eden has a really good blog post about just this topic: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...