I've seen the biggest benefit from a client heavy approach even with rails. Make the api the core of your system, makes it easier to refactor down the road into

I've seen the biggest benefit from a client heavy approach even with rails. Make the api the core of your system, makes it easier to refactor down the road into microservices. For a lot of web apps there is no real need for server side templating, once you get beyond server templating its easier to make native versions of your app or use xamarian to access the same api from a common c# codebase for native. Place your business logic in the api and there's really nothing for someone to steal from view source because your clients are just REST wrappers.