Comment by Jenk
4 years ago
It should be obvious why SPA/PWA frameworks were developed by the likes of facebook and Google: Offloading their content rendering to the client.
Instead of Google/Facebook CPU cycles being spent on rendering their content, it's now the client devices, while the Google/Facebook infrastructure is "just" serving the data.
First lead dev offered me advice for the rest of my career.
Most of what you are going to see people argue about are cyclical fads. A pendulum. We try A and it doesn’t work. So we try !A. And when people forget why we stopped doing A someone tries it again over and over.
How are things different this time should be your second question. Your first question is what is the middle ground? Boolean logic falls on its face in the real world. If 1 is bad that doesn’t mean 200 is better. If 200 was bad the solution is not 1. The best answer is probably three.
So I ran across a shit ton of your comments in this thread, like how you think, you should hit me up if you're ever hiring.
I'm sure the data that FB and Google are delivering is far more expensive than rendering HTML would be. I am skeptical that server side rendering was a big enough bottleneck for them for that to be their primary motivation. I'm also skeptical that SPA frameworks would have been widely adopted by developers all over the world if they were just some conspiratorial plot by tech companies to save on CPU cycles.
This is completely inaccurate. Every millisecond of load time affects conversion so much that they would trade huge amounts of CPU to speed up a page load.
Until you have a monopoly, at which point conversion rates don't matter or rather don't change despite terrible UX.