So the reason I always hear is performance: Less HTTP-requests, less latency, therefore better user experience. While that might be the case for flaky mobile connections (although executing lots of Javascript on resource constraint devices might not be the best idea either), with fast wired connections I experience the opposite: The single page apps of today feel a lot slower to me, than the websites with the same functionality did 10 years ago, thanks to all the computation which has to be done on client side. Just take Youtube for example: What a bad experience nowadays, especially with Firefox. That was way better back in a time when they didn't try to avoid page refreshes. And it's not just Youtube, it's all over the web. A welcome change to all of that is HN, because it still feels as fast as websites did, before frontend development was even a thing.