@Drulac Because from what I understand, you only download the content, usually pure text, and nothing else.

With gopher you need only one request per content while with the Web you may do several subsequent requests for the CSS, JS and image when you only want to get one page.

Also, the gopher protocol requires less overhead than HTTP.
Everything is technically simpler.

Here is an article which explains a part of it: https://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/relevance.html