[zarzavat]

For simple projects it really doesn't make much difference. Depending on your available tools, client-side or server-side rendering might be easier. In the end the only difference is what is going down the wire: data or HTML.

That said, client-side rendering is strictly more general than server-side rendering. So I prefer to use client-side rendering everywhere so that I don't have to switch between two different modalities and maintain two sets of tooling (or worse switch in the middle of a project!) I gather this is against the current fashion but whatever.

[DangitBobby]

There comes a point in a project where the amount of client-side features requested makes you wish you had started with a fully-fledged modern framework like React. New features could be a single React component plus some updates to existing callbacks, and a new API call, but instead requires adding to a big accreting ball of HTML templates and a hodge-podge of vanilla (and maybe jQuery) js amounting to a bespoke framework that someone had to develop to manage the complexity.

I absolutely love Django and old-style web frameworks, but they are not without their own complexity risks.

[eric4smith]

Makes HUGE difference. All the front-end work is another complete app with all the work that entails.