Sure, I get that. What I'm saying is -- if you prefer to keep things simple and use server rendering, using server rendering alone with React (no routing, Redux

Sure, I get that. What I'm saying is -- if you prefer to keep things simple and use server rendering, using server rendering alone with React (no routing, Redux, etc) is pretty much identical to using templates. You can treat React itself as a single-pass server template engine with component support. You don't have to bring all of this single-page app stuff into it. Hope that explains my point. You don't even have to run React on the client at all. I'm specifically talking about ReactDOMServer.renderToString() on the server and serving that HTML. Not "mounting into a <div>" client use case.