You seem hellbent convinced that bad connections don't matter if you can't personally see them. Consider that if you're here in a community full of some of the geekiest people to ever roam the planet and you have a wave of people telling you there's a problem, that there's probably hundreds of thousands of folks suffering in silence that you'll never hear from - maybe because their connection is throttled or high-ping or some other calamity.
POP predates HTML so I’m not even sure why this is a big deal considering that Google kept the lightest and oldest possible method of email access available.