[ams6110]

First generations of browser-based UI did refresh/reload the page a lot. But there was nothing else they could do, really. AJAX wasn't a thing, DOM manipulation wasn't possible.

Older UIs written in Visual Basic, Delphi, Powerbuilder, or even for text-mode interfaces did not do this, because the frameworks supported refreshing only the changed data.

Look at how emacs or vi works over a 1200 baud dial-up connection. Surprise, it does, because it only redraws the parts of the screen that are changed. These problems were solved in the 1970s and 1980s.

The web broswer has been for most of its existence a really bad way to deliver user interfaces. The zero-deploy nature of it was very powerful though, so people suffered through it. Only in the last few years have browser-based interfaces approached the abilities of native clients.