It seems to me that you are describing click-bait blogs and the work of junior trend-driven developers. I have worked with plenty of clients who actually needed SPAs. Custom CRMs and ERPs, etc.
The quality front-end developers are not the ones who make small blogs or small corner store websites. It's agency developers working on huge projects. Those projects have big budgets on optimisation and page speed.
"The web" isn't an entity. It is a network of websites and applications. Some of them are slow and over-engineered and others are bloated excuses to display adverts. I can assure you that every single front-end developer I have worked with understood those issues and pushed for the right technologies.
The quality front-end developers are not the ones who make small blogs or small corner store websites. It's agency developers working on huge projects. Those projects have big budgets on optimisation and page speed.
Switch your gmail account to Basic HTML (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049) and see how the SPA version isn't any slower but in fact much more pleasant to use.
"The web" isn't an entity. It is a network of websites and applications. Some of them are slow and over-engineered and others are bloated excuses to display adverts. I can assure you that every single front-end developer I have worked with understood those issues and pushed for the right technologies.