I agree and disagree. I think API first and some form of a SPA is insanely powerful and probably the way to go for most larger scale projects. For everything else there is a lot of things that can be solved from a simple templating system. Sure its not as sexy but for a lot of the business cases you really don't need a sexy interface.

My favorite example is the bloatware that is Asana. I would be 10x happier if it was a using simple components written in JS but not the whole app hiding inside of a bloated SPA.