Why does a brand new MacBook Air with default Safari settings refuse to load webpages?

I have repeatedly force quit Safari, cleared my history and cleared the cache through dev tools. I have also turned off Prevent cross-site tracking (which I would have preferred to keep active) and Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness is off. At this point major web pages are dragging with unacceptably long load times and frequently refusing to fully load the page at all.

I am not sure what the thinking was to cripple web browsing in favor of attempting to protect privacy. At this point I am just going to install Firefox and be done with it.