[arcticwombat]

I have to say my experience tracks this too.

A lot of the "modern" toolsets just aren't worth the extra fluff they add.

Writing SPA's in React, Angular, etc. tend to result in a very heavy first page load, then api calls with poor UX for all actions.

[ivanhoe]

Don't regular web sites do exactly the same? They also usually pack all JS and CSS into two big files in order to reduce the number of requests on the initial load, right? And beside in SPAs you can split the code and lazy load it to reduce the load.

[collyw]

In the last Angular app that I inherited every menu on the page needed a separate call to populate it. It probably wasn't the best written app. I think if it had been plain Django with some jQuery for front end validation the size code could have easily been cut by a half or more.