Seems like his benchmark is not really measuring a realistic use case. Typically a client-side rendered application will have a big blob of external script (i.e

Seems like his benchmark is not really measuring a realistic use case. Typically a client-side rendered application will have a big blob of external script (i.e. the application code) that it will have to pull down before rendering can begin - in his example the client side rendering code is A) tiny, and B) already bundled into the page itself meaning that there isn't going to be any delay on client side rendering once the html is downloaded. Server side generation helps when there is a large amount of application javascript that needs to be downloaded before rendering can begin on the client. Having some html bootstrapped from the server means that the user gets a faster first paint time (though the page is admittedly non-interactive) which gives the impression of a faster page load.