[the_gastropod]

I've been professionally working on SPAs for the past 7 years. I'm familiar. I strongly disagree with the premise that it's in any way more productive. I'm, at a minimum, 2x more productive building something the traditional "Rails way" with server-rendered HTML, and a handful of JS enhancements where necessary vs doing a full-blown SPA. I'd love to do a showdown, and challenge anyone to a head-to-head non-trivial app build-off to put these competing notions to the test.

[nohuhu]

Everybody is different. You might be more productive at doing stuff the "Rails way", somebody else might not be. I know I won't be, simply because I don't know Ruby and/or Rails enough to be productive in it.

Not every organization can use this approach either. E.g. I work at a True Java Shop(tm), where voicing the idea of using Ruby for a back end service would get me laughed out of the room with a permanent label of That Funny Guy Who Likes Toy Languages.

Using React for a front end client application that consumes back end API built in Java is 10x more productive than doing the traditional "Java Way" application with server-rendered HTML.