What's worse is when you expect it, so you wait a second, and it still hasn't loaded, so you click and the instant you click it shifts to an ad.

Isn't this a known dark pattern? Not so mildly infuriating for me.

It’s called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). A respectable website would monitor this before and after making changes but most don’t and of course there are some which know that they benefit from it happening.

https://web.dev/articles/cls

This but it’s when I search for something like an app on my phone and the results are still loading I HATE IT

Oh the menu...save 10% by signing up

it's frustrating because webpages were really functional without this problem a decade ago. i don't know why links jump around today. is it because it's cheaper to let the client figure out what content they need instead of using server-side computation?