I was complaining about this just yesterday[0], while waiting for my media PC, a dual core AMD APU with 8Gb of ram, to scroll the Twitch categories page. I pointed out to a friend a few minutes later how we were watching a game from 1999, which rendered full 3D environments in real time at 60+fps on a 200Mhz pentium with 32MB of ram. Here we are in 2021 with a computer several orders of magnitude more powerful and it is struggling to scroll a fucking document.

[0] to be fair, I complain about this at least 3 times a day, sometimes to an empty room.

OP here - what I found fun about my Django projects was that I used very little javascript. Mainly bootstrap and a dash of htmx. Modern browsers are freaking fast at rendering html and with a light payload and proper CDN setup, it feels like a SPA with 1/10th the work.