The explanation of what happened makes sense, but indeed it's hard to say how it's happening. My internet speed is decent so I'm certain everything on the page must have loaded by the time I started clicking. I don't disable JS, and the only extension I have active is one for grouping tabs because I happen to access Fedia on my "side" browser, so not even an adblocker. Blocking nothing at the router level either so not sure how requests could have failed :/