Server-side rendering doesn't actually mean server-side rendering though. It's a term of art for a paradigm where applications are written in a single code base

Server-side rendering doesn't actually mean server-side rendering though. It's a term of art for a paradigm where applications are written in a single code base, and certain elements are rendered on the server and cached and other, more dynamic ones are rendered by the client. The older platforms for this had you essentially write two separate backends - the one which renders HTML, and the other which returns a JSON or XML API for your hand-written JavaScript (or CoffeeScript or JQuery etc.) embedded in your HTML.