So, for (2) above, not sure I understand: camp 1) at best, a TCP connection is re-used, and the HTML for "page 2" is fetched over the network, parsed, the CSS

So, for (2) above, not sure I understand: camp 1) at best, a TCP connection is re-used, and the HTML for "page 2" is fetched over the network, parsed, the CSS OM is applied, and then the whole caboodle* is "painted on screen". camp 2) the CSS OM is applied and "page 2" is painted on-screen (possibly even faster if the browser cached "page 2" in a texture on the GPU, so the CSS OM application step may be optimized away) So I genuinely don't understand how fetching a "page 2" from a CDN (we use Cloudfront & GCP's CDN at https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com, so I'm basing my experience on this) is faster than the SPA approach? I am genuinely curious on the above -- not trying to start a flame war :D * Yes, apparently caboodle is a word?! I had to Google it just like you to make sure :)