For personal projects of course, we can do whatever we want. But I don't make a living with personal projects. I do that by working for a company 8 hours mon-fri, and there I am not in charge of the tech stack used.
Good thing too because otherwise these retro hipster devs would block every new feature with the excuse "Its not possible to do that without reloading the page in raw html"
Having your site work with "raw html" pays off several times over in my opinion, even if you completely ignore people who actually turn off Javascript:
- Page navigation becomes easier if you know the server can handle any route you throw at it as a launch point.
- You can get by with cheaper end-to-end tests for critical flows by not using Javascript in your test suite (although you should be careful to use it when it's important)
- You get a degree of protection if something does go wrong on the front end that you get a non-JS experience to fall back to.
- Pages that genuinely don't need Javascript (think like simple CRUD forms) don't have to pay the SPA tax.
Thats true. But I guess for big project there was a reason to choose some framework. Usually with big projects without any framework you would end up with your own custom framework anyway to speed up development and it would cause onboarding new team members would be harder. But sometimes this is also necessary, look at FB, they built React because they needed it and later it was adopted by community and other companies. Its realy just about what your project needs. Btw. with backend development its same or maybe worse. There are as many languages and frameworks for backend development as stars on the sky :D.