This is how most products start and then inevitably it starts to require more complex interactive pages so you have to add react and then it becomes easier for everything to be react.
Client side rendering is not strictly tied to single page apps. At a previous company we had rails render out a div containing all the data the page needed to mount the react component. No complex api design, no weird permission issues, etc.
I’ve worked on extremely complex projects (many hundreds of endpoints, many TB of data). React definitely does not scale for those at all. It has a niche for a few use cases but it’s terrible for most I have found.
It’s all about applying the correct solution to the problem and that isn’t the web if it involves react.
Client side rendering is not strictly tied to single page apps. At a previous company we had rails render out a div containing all the data the page needed to mount the react component. No complex api design, no weird permission issues, etc.