It is not faster, ever. It is always snappier to render everything server side and avoid as much JS as possible. If you can consolidate the whole page down to a

It is not faster, ever. It is always snappier to render everything server side and avoid as much JS as possible. If you can consolidate the whole page down to a half dozen total HTTP requests or less that's ideal. The narrow case where you make an XHR call to just reload a small slug of data instead of the whole page effectively does not exist in the real world. I mean I'm sure a few developers have implemented that exact pattern a few times, I think I remember even doing it myself probably? But it's not something that actually happens. What's actually happening instead is people are just adding more and more intricate tracking and analytics to all these SPAs. The XHR call to reload a blurb of text kicks off three other XHR calls to register the event with the various analytics/advertising tracking partners. Oh and we're adding a new ad partner next week so make sure you refactor all the AJAX to register event handlers for all these new interactions. And can we add mouse position tracking too? I'm starting to see some pages break into the tens of megabytes of JS scattered across hundreds of files, nobody is paying any attention to what's fast. I'm not sure how you fix this, I've largely given up on the web. It's just a thoroughly terrible experience from top to bottom, and effectively unusable if you're a layperson.