Been here for just about all of this "web" thing. When I'm pleasantly surprised by how fast & light something is it's almost always server-side rendered or static. Only benefit of SPAs is that at least they're more likely to employ responsive layouts, but then they so often also manage to have bugs that break the page in certain layouts on certain browsers (overlays/modals are a biggie) that it's kinda a wash. And that's not an inherent benefit to SPAs, just one thing they usually get sort-of right that's less likely to be correct in oldster template/static sites.

I'm old enough to remember when AJAX was supposed to make the web feel faster. It has failed spectacularly at that goal, in fact, whatever potential it may have had. It gave us much better spying on users though, so... thanks?