There is an actual problem here, a lot of the tools out there do make apps perform poorly. > If he's talking about front-end MVC-ish frameworks, they're not co

There is an actual problem here, a lot of the tools out there do make apps perform poorly. > If he's talking about front-end MVC-ish frameworks, they're not completely blameless, but generally speaking, the sites that use them feel fast once you get past the initial load. This is one of the symptoms of bad tools, you need to a get past an "initial load" instead of your UI just appearing immediately. This wouldn't be a problem in itself if the user would get some value in return for the UX regression, however most of the time the reason for the splash screen is just caused by the tool itself. Not supporting server side rendering of the HTML is just an ignorant architectural decision. The root of the problem is that the creators of these tools focus on architecture and ease of development, which is something you can get away with on the server side, unfortunately on the client side you just have to deal with user experience.