To me one of the biggest distinctions here is the overuse of the term "App". I agree that a lot of websites written as an SPA were the wrong tool for the job. There are tons of examples besides the mentioned media websites where SPA is the way to go. Most, but not all, of the applications I work on feel like desktop class applications and the traditional server side rendered approach simply would not work. This includes when I was on the iCloud Web team working on the iCloud Drive App, the Mail App and some others behind icloud.com.

I think a lot of companies that default to SPA would benefit from a very quick traditional website. However, some of the applications that I've been fortunate enough to work on would never be possible.