[timr]

The history API is a standard. The various "routing" JS toolkits are hacks built upon that feature.

"My point about an ORM is that your API becomes so simple you don't require a lot of complexity that is required with server-side joins of data in order to render a view. That is gone. No need."

Yeah, I understood your argument the first time you said it, just couldn't believe you were making the argument. If you don't like joins (related: why do you think you need an ORM to join?), don't write your server-rendered endpoints to use them. The one technology has nothing to do with the other.

That said, as soon as you want to achieve reasonable performance and scale, you will rather quickly find it essential to return multiple pieces of data in a single API call.