[timw4mail]

Oh, it does suck, hugely. Longer time to first paint, more bandwidth, more cpu and battery usage, huge dependency chains, slow "live" updates...

A lot of my issue with the Javascript-heavy present of "modern" SPA websites is that they have to recreate native browser functionality, which is inevitably slower and worse.

Way too many websites could have the same functionality, in a simpler form, with better performance with a more "traditional" stack. You can even have your API separated front-end and back-end via server-side rendering (by which I mean old-style server-side rendering).

The modern zeitgeist is mostly hype, fad, and novelty.