Comment by midrus

> "rerender previous form pages over and over again, except hidden"

There are modern ways to do this, see Unpoly, HTMX, livewire, hotwire, etc. You're comparing with an outdated view of what an MVC application looks like. It's like to complain about SPAs because of backbone.js

> "have some token to track partial form data"

This is called "sessions", the token you refer to can be a cookie, which is done by default for free on any MVC framework. Doing this in any other way lead to either losing authentication on page reload or security vulnerabilities (storing a token in localstorage, etc).

> "build up a DB to store a partially complete form"

Again, you can store partial data in a session, for free. As it comes by default with any MVC framework.

One of the key points here is that with any of the popular MVC frameworks you don't need to rebuild the wheel and the car from scratch as with SPA frameworks, most of these things come for free, specially anything related to forms. This is something we're not used to have in the SPA world and everyone has a different way to deal with it.

> Multi-page forms without some front end stuff

Nobody says there shouldn't be any frontend stuff, you still need it of course. If fields are static between steps you can just render every step and toggle between different set of fields using something like Alpine, no need to reload from the server. If fields are dynamic and need some kind of database lookup between steps, Unpoly or livewire/hotwire make this trivial.

Please, let's stop comparing Next.js/React top modern SPAs to 20 year's ago struts MVC, it has not been like that since many years ago already.