There’s no arguing against server rendering being simpler - it objectively consists of fewer components. But to say that it is more performant by nature? You can’t actually argue that. There are plenty of performance downsides to rendering a full page in response to every user action. Don’t forget, an SPA can fetch a very small amount of data and re-render a very small part of the page in response to a user action. There is a noticeably performance benefit to doing that.

Performance doesn’t only boil down to the first page load. Hopefully your application sessions are long, and the longer page load time gets amortized across the session if interactions are performant after that.

Note, I primarily work on enterprise apps where the sessions are long, and the workflows are complicated. Of course page load time matters much more for a static site or a blog / content site.

But to claim that SPAs are all cost with no benefit is just disingenuous. Of course they have their own set of trade offs. But there is a reason people use them, and it’s not some conspiracy fueled by uneducated people. Server rendering isn’t some objective moral higher ground.