SPAs designed to mirror state on the server have a distributed data problem, there are lots of problems there in terms of fetching, updating, ensuring the users are traversing from action, loading, success/failure etc

Then there's the problem that the page could have changed since the user started filling out that form, what happens when those form values now conflict etc etc

The difference between serving a dead fish of a HTML page, and a SPA application is vast because you're essentially creating 2 independent systems, server and client instead of just server and then adding one of the hardest thing in computing which is consensus between disparate systems

I'm quite excited about React Server Components because it means for the majority of your web app you can return to the simplicity of shipping HTML it doesn't solve everything but at the moment client side applications have a lot of boilerplate to do with just keeping the server in sync that would have been historically "for free" in a server context

Yes. This exactly. You're basically writing the business logic in the app twice. It's an anti-pattern in my opinion that adds all kinds of tech debt.

I'm loving it that the trend is starting to go back to rendering HTML from the server, then sprinkling on dynamic elements when desired. It's so much more efficient whether you're talking compute, developer time, or the ability to stay agile and change/add features as you learn about the market.

You've never met anyone who didn't regret React? According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 68.9% love React. I feel like you haven't talked to enough people.

The idea that client side JS was pushed to offload processing power is a bit ridiculous. Do you have any evidence for that claim? Many React sites these days do SSR anyway (running the client-side code on the server) so it doesn't seem like they would save money doing that.

That clients exist to do work so that a company's hardware doesn't have to is cynical, a "client bad [if it's built with JS]" cargo cult, and it suggests that you can't think of any upside to doing things on the user's powerful device instead of a phone-home network request to a server.

Curious why they regretted and how else would they have built the web app