Comment by TimTheTinker
5 days ago
For content-driven sites - absolutely.
I'm talking about long-lived apps where work is being accomplished. An SPA allows downloading and caching al or most of the frontend, then further communication can proceed using minimal bandwidth as the user works.
With traditional SSR, every page/form the user navigates to requires downloading all markup, styles, and client-side behaviors for that route.
Each time I was on a limited connection, regular pages would load, slowly. Anything SPA would fail to load.
I'm willing to believe SPAs with everything handwritten, containing just the necessary code, could work but that's not how SPAs are usually written.
Not only this but very simple HTML with POST forms, in addition to being lightweight, benefit from a very robust handling, where you can retry stuff and all. SPA are usually bad at this.
All markup needs to be downloaded but it might be very light, and styles are hopefully cached, so it's an issue on first load only and SPAs don't solve this.