We try to hit the cache as much as possible, and all fetching is done in parallel with Remix. We try to make heavy use of their defer function to only block on the most important data, and await the other data. Remix has the option to merge all parallel requests into a single fetch, but it didn't work for us because we use a hybrid strategy for hosting (where the most common pages are served from v8 edge functions and the less common stuff is served by node functions). The reason we don't put everything (basically) into the edge runtime is because vercel only gives you 2MB of code in the edge runtime before you have to pay HUGE money. But I've definitely put a lot of thought into the performance, so I hope it's great.
I'm surprised the carousel is slow, it's just framer motion. https://github.com/crbnos/www/blob/24d2b59150fc21e6b9c9df3b4...
EDIT: i'm going to remove the framer motion -- you're right. it's not helping. i've also got to optimize these images, but that's for another day.