There is no world where a tool or language for which you need hundreds of megabytes of unknown untrusted dependencies of dubious quality is considered a good tool.

...what? He was bemoaning React making things far more difficult than they need to be. And I think that’s a fair assessment of the situation. There’s a minimum overhead to maintaining a modern js app that is far higher than maintaining say, a Rails frontend. And it’s more costly for every change.

Rails and React are in no way comparable. They solve entirely different problems.

He's saying that there is client side rendering and now there needs to _also_ be server side rendering to compensate for its shortcomings.

There doesn't need to be server-side rendering to use React. There also doesn't need to be client-side rendering to use React.

Besides, a combo of PHP backend codebase and a jQuery frontend codebase has many more shortcomings than a single React codebase.