I'm really sick of elitist JS/front-end devs acting like these front-end heavy sites are any better than a traditional site using SSR (server-side rendering). Single page apps (SPAs) have 1 large benefit over an app with full page requests: the web dependencies (CSS,JS,etc) don't have to be looked up and downloaded on every page load. With optimized caching headers and HTTP2, this is not a problem. I agree with every point this guy makes: https://blog.usejournal.com/spa-or-...

But your lose interactivity on each refresh, and a quick ajax request is a lot quicker than getting the whole page again!
I suppose it depends on the website, but I think you are being to quick to disregard SPAs. They can make the user interactivity much more pleasant and enjoyable sometimes

There's only 1 point I can 100% agree with personally, and that is the 9th, about accessibility.... All the others seem rather opinionated and/or diminutive...

While I share the sentiment that not every website needs to be a spa. And that it makes no sense at all for some use cases... They do have their place....

From the article: "The 90% of SPA websites I have worked on could have been made with a simple static site generator like hugo or jekyll, having Javascript components here and there when needed"

THIS. There's too much bloated shit out there with no added value, and current web devs even repeat crap that was already dead. Like spash pages, which they re-introduce with this hero image shit and basically blank landing page.

For me the rule of thumb is:

Building a website in the classical sense? SSR!
Building something like a desktop app, only in the browser? SPA/PWA

I have worked on both. SSR is a poor separation of concerns. It's about guiding devs to work towards scalability and reusability. In SSR Devs end up wrapping data access and rendering in a tightly coupled ball. Scaling suffers and when you find you need a nice reusable REST API later which describes your business its too late

@BobsterGaming Honestly, I’m not completely convinced SSR and SPAs are mutually exclusive. Almost all my sites render server side with Twig templates, but then I use AJAX for subsequent interactions. When it’s time to load another module or page, I render server side again (sometimes even just grabbing the page with AJAX and dumping the main content on the current page like a SPA). As developers, nearly every decision we make is balancing or sacrificing speed for maintainability. At the end of the day, whether you render SS or CS, your bottleneck is almost always the database anyway.