Well, I'm from Germany, but have a 6-y/o Android phone and live in a rural area with poor EDGE connectivity (~50kb/s). Most "modern" websites don't load/work for me.
From my personal experience, there's quite a few people now saying that their computing devices are getting faster and faster every year whereas the majority of websites, uh, webapps are seemingly getting slower each year...
This is also not just a problem with mobile and poor connectivity. Here's an example from my high-powered desktop work-station with a 100 mbits: When I open https://github.com/, my repositories (on the left) are server-rendered and shown instantly as the site is loaded, which usually happens in under 1s. The activity feed in the middle is rendered asynchronously on the client. It usually takes around 3-6s to finish rendering on my machine (while there is space for 5-8 activity feed items on my screen).
Optimizing SPAs is notoriously hard. You don't really have to optimize HTML.
Well, I certainly also do not tolerate the delays in contemporary React sites either. Take Reddit for example, which used to be lightning fast when it was mostly serverside, which now is painfully slow, especially on mobile.
Oh yeah. I remember the "let's just apply the good parts of AngularJS here and there" in v4-6.
"React was built for Facebook, which is a large company building a large-scale application."
One large scale application, which is not enough to create stable conventions that are badly needed in a framework that's supposed to be used in multiple such projects done by very different organisations.
Personally, I hope that server-side rendering will be the new ~old~ trend.
Users don't tolerate the inherent delays caused by this approach anymore.
All those hoops current frameworks are jumping through so that we can eat the cake and have it too are there because of this.