I totally agree with MarkR42 and was thinking the same thing when I had your question, OP. My main conclusion became server side processing is the black box at

I totally agree with MarkR42 and was thinking the same thing when I had your question, OP. My main conclusion became server side processing is the black box at least in my case where the value add is through the REST APIs the javascript works with to present the right data to the user.