> This actual paint time is surely not any different than if you rendered the exact same application from pre-hydrated HTML though. Well, it's different in dif

> This actual paint time is surely not any different than if you rendered the exact same application from pre-hydrated HTML though. Well, it's different in different ways, depending on which goalpost you're standing on. If by that you mean do SSR, then run React on top, then you've just incurred the same TTFP as plain HTML, plus the cost of React hydration, plus potentially a second repaint (or even third and fourth repaints, depending on how your data trickles in). In the wild, this pattern gets particularly egregious when people decide that it's ok to have loading icons and widgets pushing each other down as data comes in. If you mean to compare to client-side rendering without SSR, then you're still looking at the cost of at least two repaints (the initial TTFP repaint, plus any repaints from data fetching after that).