[sanderjd]

I've always thought some of it stems from the nomenclature and the cultures that flow from it. A lot of people (reasonably) don't think the best architecture for their application is a "single page". But many of those same people nonetheless have (often large) portions of their application that benefit from complex client side interactivity. But the whole thing can seem really all or nothing, either you have a "single page application" that does everything client side or you do everything through html from the server. Of course in practice everybody does some hybrid in between these two extremes. But the apparent split creates a cultural battle between the extremes, which is not helpful.

[lsalvatore]

I come from a financial reporting background where pages needed to be dynamic and update through filters / sorting / etc- think Excel or Robinhood- these are applications, not pages. When you are building an application, users don't want to experience a page refresh. You either want a dynamic behavior without page refresh, or not. React Router gives you client-side routing- I don't know why you wouldn't want that even if you were building something like AirBnB where there is mostly static content- to argue against dynamic search and filtering without page refresh seems silly to me.

[sanderjd]

Yep exactly this. I even just used Coinbase Pro vs. Vanguard in another thread as a concrete example of application vs. website where the Vanguard approach would really suck for an actual trading application.