It also made things slow. Modern SPA links have pre loading optimizations baked in. It's quite important especially if your users are on mobile.

The average modern SPA pulls in far more unnecessary JS than the average plain HTML site pulls in via redundant tag structure following the initial page load. Moreover, server-rendered HTML renders far more quickly because there tends to be fewer total requests and there’s no hiccup parsing the JS when it lands, much less the time it takes to execute it.

And don't forget that gzip works wonders, removing most of the network overhead of transmitting redundant tags.

Browsers are perfectly capable of prefetching pages on their own.