People are emotionally attached to SPA's because they are:
1) Annoyed by page refreshes
2) SPA's is a special skill now, frontend developers take pride in knowing everything about React, Vue, Angular and spending hours and hours updating their NPM dependencies. How can they justify all the time spent if it's not almost like a science?
3) Separates the frontend guys from the backend guys. Technologies like HTMX allows the backend developer to pretty much do the whole job, which concerns a few people.
Eh, backend devs don't want to do the whole job. They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page). They definitely do not want to be involved in generating specific HTML fragments and subsequently fiddling with them whenever a designer decides something needs a minor alteration.
I've looked a bit for examples of HTMX in the wild, and the only times I've found it it's been so slow I would have preferred a full page refresh which at least lets me bookmark/navigate properly and involves no JS at all. Not enough data to really form a strong opinion though, I freely admit.
> They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page)
I've seen that quite a few times. Basically moving the entire business logic to the frontend, so that the backend can remain elegant and generic (yet somehow complicated too). In the end it actually makes for a slower app experience and may cause insane complexity on the frontend.
That's not true though. Yes, if it needs to be a complex and breathtaking frontend that has all the bells and the whistles.
But backend developers often need or have a desire to build a perfectly usable frontend for their service, without relying on a frontend person to start with. This could be due to project ambitions or budget.
1) Annoyed by page refreshes
2) SPA's is a special skill now, frontend developers take pride in knowing everything about React, Vue, Angular and spending hours and hours updating their NPM dependencies. How can they justify all the time spent if it's not almost like a science?
3) Separates the frontend guys from the backend guys. Technologies like HTMX allows the backend developer to pretty much do the whole job, which concerns a few people.