> Page weight isn't that big of a deal, a 2 MB ball of js is nothing compared to the multi megabyte pictures and videos people routinely add to pages.
That's a good argument if you're one of the people adding multi megabyte pictures and videos to your pages, but I'd bet that if page size is of concern to you, you're not one of them, so "a 2 MB ball of js" would suddenly become your weakest link.
You say "weakest link" like there is an optimum. People are regularly downloading 4k video. By choice, they want to be doing this.
Amazon is one of the most successful websites ever created and last I checked came in at over 12MB page weight. Mostly highly optimized images. I'm sure they wrangle and agonize what shows up there.
There's a limit somewhere, but pointing the finger at a ball of js that compresses to less than 500k isn't particularly reasonable.
User experience is more about latency. Be it from local compute or remote compute+network.
If your visitors are one and done you must SSR at a minimum. Because that will drive the average latency of the majority of user experience.
If they are long term users, you should seriously look at user local data and potentially full offline functionality that can mask even poor 3g performance and spotty networks. Making users suffer long term through an MPA architecture is silly.
That's a good argument if you're one of the people adding multi megabyte pictures and videos to your pages, but I'd bet that if page size is of concern to you, you're not one of them, so "a 2 MB ball of js" would suddenly become your weakest link.