Comment by outworlder

When SPA started picking up steam, I thought it was an amazing development! We had gone from mainframes, to personal computers, and were back to mainframes and using our powerful machines as glorified dumb terminals. This way, we could have UI code running locally, and servers only handling state. Plus, less data to transfer!

Then the frameworks ballooned in size. What previously was seen as wasteful (rendering and sending HTML) started to seem pretty frugal in comparison to the multi megabyte pages. Not to mention that one could always send just page fragments.

Other than specialized apps, I think most single page applications are a mistake. Sure, some may benefit from a nice UI - say, I'm writing a 3D modeler. But most apps there are could just re-render pages. 'Refresh' is not much of a problem in an age where simple REST API calls are returning megabytes of JSON data...