I feel like there is some happy medium. For instance, biasing toward declarative documents as much as possible (HTML and CSS DOM) and perhaps fetching and comp

I feel like there is some happy medium. For instance, biasing toward declarative documents as much as possible (HTML and CSS DOM) and perhaps fetching and compiling/linking only needed JS functions with intelligent asset pipelines. I built production web sites with Play Framework's asset pipeline that netted a single first party JS file and no external JS. As could be expected via minimalism it felt faster than almost every site on the internet. Even with third party JS you could cache, compile/perform weak linkage step, and ship a single JS file. No site necessarily needs more than three docs (HTML, CSS, JS) for the first hit plus whatever images, sprites, and fonts load async.