[arbenpurben]

I mean this sincerely: can you demonstrate how using React et al for 95% of web apps (not talking about highly interactive stuff, offline-first or other special cases) was at all a step forward for web apps, OTHER than eliminating full page refreshes and thereby improving UX? Nevermind developer experience, although that is more subjective of course. The "decoupling" and "single JSON-based REST API for all clients", etc. arguments are nice in theory but impractical in reality. By all means have a JSON-based API for exactly that - application programming interfaces, not human-consumable interfaces. I would argue the development, deployment & maintainability complexity of those SPAs can not be justified for most web apps, if you are able to offer the essentially the same UX benefits with an HDA approach.

[southerntofu]

I love the idea of a SPA without full page refresh. But from experience, the UX of that is terrible! 99% of SPAs i've tried prevented me from using history navigation from my browser, and simply failed in unobvious way when the network wasn't reachable (yeah just keep on spinning without ever loading anything or timing out).

When doing a "full page refresh" my browser has good UX for displaying errors and retrying requests, potentially resending <form> data. SPAs don't have any of that.SPAs is a cool pattern but as long as it is not supported by the HTML/CSS specs (and therefore the browser natively) it will remain terrible from a UX perspective.