[KronisLV]

> There isnt a definitive right or wrong

As someone who struggled with the downright problematic lifecycle of complex JSF/PrimeFaces apps and now is in a year-long-with-no-end-in-sight migration to a SPA, I will say that the SPA wins out in quite a few development/maintenance/convenience facets, second order system effect or not. As with all migrations, it's slower than you'd expect but the pace of creating new stuff is far more promising (especially if you fight off pixel pushers) and the experience of maintaining SPAs has been good in other projects, especially given that the old JSF/PrimeFaces setup has been around for like a decade (and performed poorly throughout that time, with plenty of footguns that a wide roster of developers kept tripping over).

On the other hand, I will completely admit that SPA can bring additional complexity (especially if you end up with one of those needlessly complex solutions like Next.js or Vuex, when all you need is under 100 components across maybe a number of views on the same order of magnitude), but one also has to consider that some of the traditionally SSR solutions eventually strive to have more reactivity and often create mechanisms for partial updates, except across the board they end up being harder to debug and customize compared to some JS/TS calling a vaguely RESTful API over HTTP(S).

I unironically liked it way more when "web app" meant some PHP returning pages with forms and some Bootstrap on top, even some light jQuery (but we all know how badly the "light" bit held up).