jQuery days make me like React, but it's not because I like SPAs, it's because it gives things an intuitive and reusable structure that I can organize and maintain much more effectively and can pretty much be the same server and client side. React is even a comparative pleasure to use for building static sites.
I've always assumed SPAs were partially driven by it historically being difficult to combine server side and client side rendering with a single shared code base more than anything - so much of the early stuff ended up in people essentially having to maintain two entire sites between front and back end rather than just one.
people have diverse experiences -> "I really have no clue what they do for a living"
That escalated quickly.
I'm not even sure they were not trolls like you seem to think, but having that line of thoughts by default (because you are also unlikely to have any evidence of your theories) is just sad.