I mean, is this really a legitimate problem? Full page reloads don't bother me very much at all, and they actually come with a lot of niceties. Like URLs and the back button working normally.
For me personally, not usually. But having worked on a few different companies with embeddable widgets, yes it is. The page-based (SSG) routing is not an option there. And even in CRUDs the product folks want WYSIWYG and smooth uploads of assets. With more and more bling it's just inevitable that one will need a JS framework eventually.