The web has a huge anti- crowd all around it. People detest that there's this terrible awful wretched browser pretending like it can do code. Which is 98% gatekeeping sad-pants whiner-shit.

There's problems, but the amplification problem is uber for real, and most of the complaints just don't frigging matter; this is 98% a Bullshit Asymmetry problem: it takes vastly more energy to care about & refute troll-ish petty behavior than it takes to generate it. Positive behavior rarely gets amplified. There's an outsized representation for anger/negativity, as there almost always is, everywhere, forever.

Personally I think it's absurd to favor servers. AKA mainframes. Thick client web systems have a fundamental embrace of user-agency, in a way that thin-client systems are utterly unable to negotiate. It's cheap and easy to take digs on how bad things have been, and 100%, there's been a pretty poor developmental track record & much could & should be better in the client side universe. But it's still 100% better a RFC 8890 paradigm - The Internet Is For Users - than literally all the rest of computing, which has nothing for users & offers them diddly squat in terms of agency.

Alex's critique / pouring gas on the fire is wrong for a simple reason: we've been asleep at the wheel & embraced little change. URL routing, incremental loading, offline capability, & a host of interesting sprawling new web capabilities that could improve everything are still drastically unadopted. We have a lot of libraries for orthogonal concerns, but there have been essentially zero successful efforts in the last decade to define a system even as comprehensively cross-cutting as literally the first successful JavaScript framework was, Backbone. We have reduced scope since, and left orgs to cobble together orthogonal libraries, which has strengths, but makes it harder to adopt & leverage the high minded better potentials of what could happen. The web just hasn't evolved or advanced significantly, in spite of some churning iteration for how we all React.

SPAs are wonderful, but we've crashed against the limits of what we are willing to explore, and there's been a lack of way forward projected, and the upsurge in anti-SPA SSR is basically just an off-gassing, a pent up pressure to do anything other than what we've been up to, and while it has some virtue, I still ascribe most of it's interest to the fact that client-side systems have been at a standstill & real coherence & sensible integrative holistic imagining of how we might better do SPA's has been obviously absent for a while now.

GraphQL was some attempt to respin the front-end world but I think by now we know it's not really actually much different or better, but there's ideas captured there, where front-ends are not as hand-craft artisinally-made that we still are far from, and there's countless capabilities we should be tapping - like good Service Worker patterns, much more webworker and distributed computing ideas - that have made essentially no progress. At some point we need to upgrade & enhance what we expect of SPAs, but while the tooling has changed somewhat (React moving from classes, to HoC, to hooks, Redux to whatever), there's been little actual embrasure of real change, real web capabilities, that have been all about.

SPAs are still one of the greatest best option out there, even though their means-of-production are essentially unchanged for a decade & the hipsters are desperately hungry for cooler/bettter. Even though we've hit this kind of so so local maxima, there's just nothing anywhere as effective, and the whole SSR pitch may fit some roles, but for like 98% of systems, a SPA has a ton of advantages in being a more unified isolated independent thick client that just networks back to a bunch of dumb resources, which is a better/simpler & less overhead model - albeit one with some more loading cost - than the radically weirder & more complex models of splicing apart the baby & having part of the work happen one place & part of the work happen elsewhere. And none of that is good for the user anyways. I look forward to a new novel exciting future, but this is not the RFC 8890 way forwards. SPAs are kind of stuck, but still the best version of the web we have.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890