[scaryclam]

No, no it hasn't. Just because there are a bunch of terrible front end developers trying to push that notion doesn't make it true. Any half way competant front end developer will be able to create sophisticated websites that are usable for the vast majority of their users and they'll be using something like progressive enhancement to do it.

[tracker1]

Client rendering doesn't have to be so bad... I actually did do it as an optimization back in the dialup days. React is pretty nice, and if you really want to reduce payload, you can build against inferno or preact for similar results at a smaller payload, but since React packaged JS is usually less than a single moderately sized image, it's really less of an issue.

Although that doesn't mean to go ahead and throw in lodash + underscore + ramda + jquery + jquery extensions all on top of react/redux. Just because you're using a modern framework, doesn't mean it needs to be huge. You can build a basic app with preact and min+gz hitting a total size around 20-30kb.

Yes, that's more than server-rendered simple AMP-style html... on the flip side, you don't have to round trip for every screen either. It's also a LOT smaller than some of the behemoths out there, and even then, a lot of the time Images are the biggest hit in bandwidth.