Fair. I haven't tried rendering server-side with React. I'm sure it's as much a maintenance nightmare as much as any major feature. But I do have apps I mainta

Fair. I haven't tried rendering server-side with React. I'm sure it's as much a maintenance nightmare as much as any major feature. But I do have apps I maintain that started as traditional Rails apps and have been progressively enhanced to a point where they perform a lot like more modern client-side apps. And an interesting property I've discovered to be true of such an app is that it's really quite easy to convert that traditional view-rendering pipeline to React, because there is almost no JS-soup being relied on for core pieces to function. On the flip side, I also work on a couple apps where most of the functionality exists as JQuery DOM manipulation or as Bootstrapified data binding, and these are nearly impossible to port to a diff-based rendering library like React without rewriting most of the functionality. So while I haven't exactly tried rendering React on the server, I've found that the more traditional server-side rendering flow still holds up quite well on the modern web. It's a good way of thinking about how your app should look/behave given a set of states, and it holds up well even in places where Javascript is required. The fact that it can be accomplished without Javascript is more of a side-effect, but also a good indication that it's not any particular bit of Javascript that is holding it all together.