I've designed and programmed highly interactive SPAs for customers large and small, and the reaction is invariably "I can't believe this is a website, it feels like an app". Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it, but I know that while the base design plays a part, so does the concrete UI implementation.
I wonder how many of the people crapping on SPAs are actual front-end or full-stack app devs, or otherwise people developing very close to the UX.
I'm sure there are some disgruntled UX devs who are running back to SSR, but when I come to the bimonthly "SPA sucks" thread on HN, for the most part it feels to me as though the critiques are coming from people for whom UX and front-end development are secondary concerns.
> Being non-technical, they can't put their finger on it
This is an interesting perspective. To me, SPAs blur the line between what's happening locally and server-side, so my impatience with slow functions on an SPA page is much greater than the same thing happening on a SSR page. Maybe it's just my conditioning to expect things on a single page to work much quicker as opposed to moving between pages.
IMO, well-designed SPAs should make use of the context-switching function of a complete page fetch in situations where the user might need to wait a relatively longer time for something to load instead of loading bars/spinners.
I wonder how many of the people crapping on SPAs are actual front-end or full-stack app devs, or otherwise people developing very close to the UX.
I'm sure there are some disgruntled UX devs who are running back to SSR, but when I come to the bimonthly "SPA sucks" thread on HN, for the most part it feels to me as though the critiques are coming from people for whom UX and front-end development are secondary concerns.