TL;DR Author is just riding on the hype with contrarian opinion. What sucks is that nowadays most sites won't load without JS. I notice because I use NoScript.

TL;DR Author is just riding on the hype with contrarian opinion. What sucks is that nowadays most sites won't load without JS. I notice because I use NoScript. But! If you have done any desktop GUI development, you know that React is way closer to it than the old ways of composing web pages. If it is possible to render React, or anything that resembles desktop GUI frameworks, on server, then what exactly are you complaining about? Is the spaghetting with separate HTML, CSS, and JS glue really anything worth applauding?