Comment by hombre_fatal

As others have said, history management in a SPA tends to be done for you. But if you were to do it yourself, you would centralize your href-click handling in a single spot where you go history.pushState(path) and never bother with it again, it simply hooks into all <a>.

While bad SPAs do this badly just like bad iOS clients do things badly (like incessant spinners, zero caching, and unselectable text), it's a small concesión to make in the scheme of client-side development.

On the other hand, have you ever wrestled with CoreData on iOS? It's like using the worst ORM with the worst Active Record abstraction, easy to get wrong, yet that's the tool you're given. And you're choosing between that built-in solution or going off the rails with another solution with its own trade-offs, and both paths feel like you're wrestling with the platform.

It just comes with the space of client-development, you just tend to get used to wrestling with the platform you have the most experience with, and it's easy to forget that when you judge the concessions that must be made on other platforms.