I've been doing web development for about 20 years, and have the opposite reaction. I started web development with Flash (dark times), jQuery, and/or Django. I

I've been doing web development for about 20 years, and have the opposite reaction. I started web development with Flash (dark times), jQuery, and/or Django. I love that people are pushing back on the SPA architecture everywhere (though SPAs are still the right choice for some apps). Some people are pushing back like you (returning to backend renderering), and others are pushing back like the implementer/poster by trying to extend the original intent of REST architecture (not JSON apis the term has come to mean). I think the htmx architecture is brilliant, though it's not something I would use for the majority of my projects (it doesn't fit the use case). I think what folks who have come to web dev recently don't understand the historical tradeoffs that led to SPAs or the current web dev ecosystem. It was terrible to build websites, but it was worse to build cross-platform applications using the existing tools and delivery systems. The browser solved a lot of that, and SPAs were an attempt to upgrade web architecture to support that need. People forget the positives because of how ubiquitous they've become and only look at the negatives. I'm glad we're moving away from the SPA-only world, but every web framework that we use nowadays has been influenced by the advent of node+SPAs