You are correct; caching is always hard. Load and bloat? Well that depends. If you're doing a realtime collaborative texteditor with a realtime chat, I just do

You are correct; caching is always hard. Load and bloat? Well that depends. If you're doing a realtime collaborative texteditor with a realtime chat, I just don't see how you'd get anything even remotely nice without what you call "load and bloat". However, to return to the original topic. Which is simpler: a) creating a performant data API b) creating a performant server that handles data stuff just like a) AND all the rendering & UI stuff Surely the latter is more complex since it has more responsibilities?