[jvanderbot]

Ah ... calling server-side "flawed from the beginning" is a bit overkill. The use case is a bit convoluted. HTML itself is not the problem that slows down modern web experience, is it?

Also, in your example, don't forget the code required to render that data, which is often a second fetch and is, you guessed it, utf-8 / ascii/ unicode. Now we've double startup costs or forced http/2.

There's some context with these opinions. I concur that rendering server-side is often much, much simpler, but acknowledge that might be because that was what came first; and I acknowledge that some of the hate against client-side is b/c modern web often feels bloated and JS takes the blame.