If adding some analytics adds 5s to the load time, then they need to fire their developers.

There's no way this is accidental.

with that asshole in command? Uhm...

Every bad decision there is intentional

But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.

occam's razor says you should ;)

The fact that specific domains and user agents are effected by this says otherwise. Take a look in the link for people discussing curling the urls and their findings.

It's Elmo.

It's definitely malicious in nature.