Indeed, “The initial learning curve is steeper than dropping in a <script>”. Maybe for you, but I was doing that basic thing in a mix of Django around 2010. It was getting away from traditional form POST and reload the page while still taking advantage of Django’s templating system. I keep trying to find the best answer to this approach across the things available as it feels like it would make vibe coding easier to manage and understand as well.
The problem with the SPA is that the browser is a document platform being abused to run GUI applications. It's missing the core primitives that real UI platforms had in the 90s, like decent smart sortable tables and data bindings. So all that crap is redone in JS ten thousand times by developers of varying talents and the result is, has been, and will continue to be crap usability and hugely bloated sites.
It's time to replace the HTML part of the browser with something else designed for purpose: making rich UIs that use platform-native widgets and mirror the human user interface design guide for the platform. XUL was a step in the right direction.
Lets bring back Java Applets and Flash. I thought WASM was going to get more than niche adoption but it hasn't and there hasn't been anything else that I've heard gaining popularity. I think an element of this is because JS is the easiest language to learn, you don't need to know anything about servers, databases, etc.
Most web applications have RDBMS behind them (aka CRUD apps) so any data from client submitted to server using a text protocol (HTTP) needs to go through validation and casting to the data types of the RDBMS columns. In my opinion there are fewer trade-offs with doing server side programming of the view and more tools available today like hotwire/turbo, liveview, etc. to make it easier.
There are simply too many platforms for native app development to come back and replace web apps in any measurable percentage.
The primary problem with SPAs is actually that the server state is duplicated client-side, which inevitably leads to state desync bugs.
The secondary problem is SPAs approximately double the amount of code you need to write compared to a server-side approach for the same level of interactivity.
