Spinners are not just for loading the content, their main place IMHO is in web apps as a way to give user a feedback that their UI action resulted in some actio

Spinners are not just for loading the content, their main place IMHO is in web apps as a way to give user a feedback that their UI action resulted in some action that's currently still running (e.g. an api call in the background that takes some time). For that purpose spinners are probably the best you can do. If all you need to cover is just the content loading sequence, why not use the proper progress bar? Nowadays when we have HTTP/2 and don't have to bundle all the calls together anymore, your code can learn ahead how many content blocks it has to load in a certain layout, so it's not that hard to automate it to update the progress bar accordingly. Although I'd frankly always prefer the endless animated spinner to having the progress bar get stuck at 99% in the glorious Win98 style...