I also worked through the pre-Javascript world, the jquery world, the backbone world, and now the react world. And while I'm productive with react-like stacks,

I also worked through the pre-Javascript world, the jquery world, the backbone world, and now the react world. And while I'm productive with react-like stacks, I've rediscovered how much more productive I am with HTML-centric SSR. The problem you describe is solved by frameworks like Rails, and has been for at least 10 years. It turns out there's no need to bring in hundreds to thousands of JS dependencies to implement your frontend. SSR gets the job done in a superior manner, both in DX and UX.