[TimMurnaghan]

Agreed if you're making a web page.

However there are lots of us writing applications which are delivered by browser. With that lens you're completely wrong. Then I do want to send json from the backend and have lots of behaviour in the frontend viewing that in different ways.

So basically it's the differences between web pages and applications.

Truth is that there aren't many other sensible ways to deliver applications any more. All big companies still have windows machines - but MS broke all of the ways of writing applications on windows so going to the browser makes sense and you get some cross platform ability - plus you get to move it to the cloud.