[dkarl]

That doesn't match what I saw. What I saw was people hammering on latency because of its effect on conversion and other forms of engagement, and believing that the best way to control latency when consumers often had slow, unreliable connections was to avoid round trips and/or push them into the background. I.e., avoid page loads. SPAs allowed developers (at a cost, granted) to control how a web page's functionality degraded when dealing with slow or spotty connections, and that was seen as having immense ROI for anything consumer-facing.

Naturally after years of investment in building consumer-facing sites like this, the skills and tools became ubiquitous and arguably overused.