[torben-friis]

Speaking as a young(ish) dev, I think the issue with SPAs is that it's that its use has been conflated with separation of concerns and agnostic backend dev.

What I mean by that is that the way we learned is that the old/wrong way (php style templates) mix front end and backend development, and data with formatting. It's better to have data available through rest APIs and then consume it from something. Which is mostly true if you plan on being available in a reasonable way from smartphone apps, etc. but of course that means that your website should also be a client capable of working as similarly as possible to a mobile app - there you go, SPAs.

We need to find a way to keep those benefits without the bulk of current SPAs. But SPAs appeared for a reason, and it would be wrong to ignore why it happened. Being able to have front and backend devs working in parallel is a benefit, being able to server your content to several frontends is a benefit, etc.

(And if you're thinking "these people don't need apps anyway", the reality is that clients demand to have them - even if it's only so they can bother users with push notifications or collect data, they do ask for them).