[tptacek]

There's something to this complaint, in that I actually rarely want an SPA either --- I usually want something that behaves like a damn web page.

But having had several years of experience building web applications in Rails, handing data carefully between templates and controller code and managing the leaky abstractions for those places I actually had to use Javascript, I do not miss that experience at all. I'm not a front-end developer (I do it when I have to) and I am 3-5X more productive in React than I ever was at Rails front-end. If that's the return a nonspecialist gets from the React stack, I can only assume someone who specializes in it does even better.

[eropple]

Similar datapoint here. I was never a Rails guy, my server-side comfort zone was always on the JVM, but React makes me so much more productive than I ever was before. I'm definitely not a frontend developer; I keep up with it because as a devops consultant I sometimes have to care, but my primary interests are server-side. When I have to slam out a web frontend to something, nothing I've ever used is faster than React, and nothing I've ever used feels as good when I'm actually using the application.

SEO? Sure, that's a problem...for web sites. I mostly make applications, though, and people who want it are the people who are looking for it.