I disagree that it costs more to make things better.

In that page in particular, they had to put in effort to use a specific background, specific fonts, specific graphics, to make a page less readable, than if they'd just used some standard, basic page formatting.

But a clean, neat doc doesn't make their point.

All that garbage at the top that looks like a jumbled mess, would've taken no effort whatsoever to not put in there. So they spent time and effort making the page worse.

It can cost more to make it more readable, more useful, or cost less. It all depends.

Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same

Sounds like the typical excuse making - blaming the tools instead of how they're used. All websites don't look the same, but many/most do look like shit and perform no better than a page in 1999 over dialup. That's becuase the developers build garbage, not because the tools suck (not saying the tools don't suck, or don't have issues, but these are the tools you get when they grow organically as new ideas produce new capabilities).

There are good, even great pages out there. How then are those built if the tools don't permit it?