[wpeterson]

I don't understand why people think serving a blank or janky page to your users is OK. There's no reason not to serve a completely rendered page from the server side and only enhance the UI with client-side rendering and navigation when there is a user action or other event after page load.

The test case used text in a table, which is an extremely poor example. Modern designs use a lot of images and CSS, where presenting a complete document and stylesheets allows much faster time to render than client-side rendering followed by fetching all those assets and applying styles.

The pain for your users is multiplied by the slowness of mobile devices/networks and the complexity of your UI's layout to render.