This is a very simplistic characterization of what's happening.
First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough.
Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Time-to-market is greatly improved, etc.
This whole "frontend vs backend" dialogue is basically white noise that completely misses the point. Use SPA or not, whatever, in the end it's just a tool to get the job done. Both are prone to errors when handled improperly.
A website that got it completely right is the Dutch corona dashboard called "Coronadashboard" created by the Dutch government: https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl. It's blazingly fast, extremely well-designed, looks great and the code is of exceptional quality. Also it's open-source, have a look at the code: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/.
The dashboard is completely written in Javascript. I truly believe a website with of such high quality would not be possible without frameworks such as React or Next.js (or whatever other framework and their respective tooling has to offer).
Closing note: let's try learn more from the websites that got it right than the ones that have failed. It's so easy to be critical, it's much harder to give some praise.
> A website that got it completely right is the Dutch corona dashboard called "Coronadashboard" created by the Dutch government
Not sure what everyone else here is using but you're right, at least for me the website is running buttery smooth in both Firefox and Chrome and the code is of exceptional quality.
> I truly believe a website with of such high quality would not be possible without frameworks such as React or Next.js (or whatever other framework and their respective tooling has to offer).
I agree. I wrote my first lines of HTML & CSS almost 20 years ago and back then JavaScript dev was nightmare. People wouldn't even have been able to create an interactive website like the Coronadashboard. (Of course we're not talking about static websites here – these were already relatively easy back then.) Nowadays, JavaScript dev admittedly still is a nightmare but there are at least tools like TypeScript, Angular, React and so on that make things a bit less painful and allow experienced web developers to create exceptional frontends. I'm putting "experienced" here because the frameworks still come with some pitfalls and bad practices are still very common. (I can't believe how many tutorials about using forms with React still recommend updating the state and re-rendering the entire form upon every.single.keystroke.)
If you are referring to a web app time to market I mostly see otherwise.
Here is an example: create a form to edit user settings. In Rails/Django it is pretty simple straightforward. But if you go React then you have an API and a component in React and have to think about routes and security of API and validations on both FE and BE.
There are advantages for SPA probably but time to market is not one of them in this case.
If you are referring to creating a mobile app and a webapp then maybe React with React Native is indeed faster. With this I agree. But I personally prefer to wait for Hotwire to launch their mobile framework and use that.
Backend and frontend are different species and require different skillsets. It's much easier to scale from an organizational perspective using SPA's, especially in companies where software is not the core product (think non-tech Fortune 500).
Why do you think it would not be possible to build a website of such quality without frameworks?
On a separate note, I think the dashboard is alright but I wouldn't call it excellent. It's a bit slow and some things, for example mousing over the map, are glitchy.
First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough.
Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Time-to-market is greatly improved, etc.
This whole "frontend vs backend" dialogue is basically white noise that completely misses the point. Use SPA or not, whatever, in the end it's just a tool to get the job done. Both are prone to errors when handled improperly.
A website that got it completely right is the Dutch corona dashboard called "Coronadashboard" created by the Dutch government: https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl. It's blazingly fast, extremely well-designed, looks great and the code is of exceptional quality. Also it's open-source, have a look at the code: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/.
The dashboard is completely written in Javascript. I truly believe a website with of such high quality would not be possible without frameworks such as React or Next.js (or whatever other framework and their respective tooling has to offer).
Closing note: let's try learn more from the websites that got it right than the ones that have failed. It's so easy to be critical, it's much harder to give some praise.