I don't remember those as the good old days, especially on true web applications. I remember more bugs than I'd care to recount with the back button and scope

I don't remember those as the good old days, especially on true web applications. I remember more bugs than I'd care to recount with the back button and scope and that's not even talking about having to simultaneously think in JavaScript and your server side rendering language of choice. I also think there is a lot of room for multiple choices. For web applications, I think server side rendering as a default is a poor choice. For information conveyance, I think server side, or even pure static sites, makes a lot of sense. What problem are you trying to solve?