> The thing is there are just vanishingly few places where you only need a "sparkling of interactivity on top".
I would say it's precisely the opposite.
Say 97% of work done by web pages and web apps in practice boils down to "render some data available on the server as HTML, then show it to the user". For these cases, putting what amounts to an entire GUI framework written in Javascript on the frontend is massive, bandwidth-sucking, performance-killing overkill.
There are absolutely exceptions. Google Sheets exists. But your project is probably not Google Sheets.
What is this “entire GUI framework written in JavaScript”? React isn’t a GUI framework, even Angular despite being quite batteries included is not that.
I swear the people writing these comments aren’t working in web development?
I would say it's precisely the opposite.
Say 97% of work done by web pages and web apps in practice boils down to "render some data available on the server as HTML, then show it to the user". For these cases, putting what amounts to an entire GUI framework written in Javascript on the frontend is massive, bandwidth-sucking, performance-killing overkill.
There are absolutely exceptions. Google Sheets exists. But your project is probably not Google Sheets.