And where was it exactly that I referred to just raw HTML?
Go read the web page analysis. The 1.3MB average page size includes images.
It seems you lack reading comprehension skills.
HTML files, image files, script files, Flash files, CSS files are all
resources. The RAM footprint of a rendered web page, however, can be many times more that the sum of sizes of all resources.
I'll try to explain it in kindergarten terms. When you walk into a restaurant and say, I want a burger, the overall "footprint" of what needs to happen for you to just walk in and get your burger is millions of times larger than just the 0.5lbs that the burger physically weighs. Giant farms need to exist to produce meat, fields from horizon to horizon growing vegetables, machinery to process and deliver the ingredients, millions of workers employed, stores built, banks exist, computers programmed... ad infinum. For you, it's only 0.5lbs of "resources", but what you don't see is the giant mechanism that makes it actually happen.
Same with loading a web page. Sure it's only 1.3MB including all images and scripts, but to deliver all this in the format you want takes the giant infrastructure of libraries and RAM allocation. It's as if you ordered a burger, and they brought to you the farms, the cows, the machines, the workers, etc. and piled all of this in front of you.
Does this make it easier for you to understand?
Can you please find out exactly how much space the Verge homepage uses up before you come in here making stuff up? Hundred of times more? You don't know how much, do you? You just pull a number out of your... keyboard and throw it out there?
On my non-retina MBP, The Verge consumed about 70MB of ram. On retina iPad, it surely will be more, since each region that needs to be rendered consumes 4x more pixels.
Do this. Open Activity Monitor on your Mac, click Memory tab, enter "safari" in search field. You'll see a bunch of items "Safari Web Content". Report your finding here.
Now, when you open Safari on your iPad, you may have a paltry 100 megs of RAM free initially. Compare this with your finding from Activity Monitor and it's no wonder anymore why Safari reloads the tabs.
