Connectivity is not always available, and errors retrieving it may mean you have to re-enter everything. Being able to "navigate" the site without the dinosaur is a tremendous boon for end users. You wouldn't be able to send anything without a connection, but you could buffer it for an opportune moment.

Sites like HN and Stackoverflow have a vastly different audience than most bread-and-butter sites, and tackle different kind of issues.

Most bread-and-butter sites are just fine as server-side rendered page. Large client-side frameworks reimplementing the browser and server functionality should be rare, when the situation actually calls for it.

If you really need a offline site then a simple service worker is all you need to cache the pages, not a big JS app.

"Big JS app"'s aren't that big if done correctly. The entirety of Angular8 fits into ~170KB, less than some thumbnails.

You can write bad apps in any language and environment, similarly a site/app is not bad just because it's done in Y.

Compression over HTTPS can be problematic, as it makes the key easier to crack.

I would like to trade out AngularJS for Vue someday, though.