Early in its life Facebook Engineering marketed React as "you probably don't know what you're doing with the DOM and incurring all sorts of performance issues with your hand-written Backbone View code, let React do that for you". In truth, you only need a vDOM with a component interface once your view code passes a certain threshold of complexity, but it just gets used everywhere, and for the simplest things, as the go-to solution.

One thing that makes me happy to spend more time on backend stuff, is that I get spared this kind of stuff and just keep doing SSR as I have always done, with a little bit of JavaScript when needed.

The irony to see all JavaScript frameworks re-inventing SSR to deal with the performance problems to do everything on the client, specially mobile phones.

AMP was a clear signal of the extent to which mobile web development was seriously flawed that Google had to go to major content publishers and say "look, your frontend is trash and nowhere near concise enough on mobile in either layout or behavior, just use our transformation layer"