I really believe it's a case of resume driven development. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but the whole move to SPAs, from my vantage point, has been driven by tech people and not leaders. Self-inflicted.
While RDD is a thing, the root cause is the stakeholders' requirements for more sophisticated and complex sites (whether smoother page transitions, more intricate effects, incessant demands to spy on every user interaction etc). It became harder and harder to do all this with server rendering and a rat's nest of jQuery. JS frameworks arose to meet these requirements and became an industry standard, and developers responded to market demand. It's all gone too far of course, but the stakeholders were as much to blame as anyone.
Yes, I agree for those cases where the SPA was created to match customer expectations. I'm talking about using it where it doesn't belong, which happens quite a lot.
You're making software engineers way more important than they are. They don't hold this kind of decision power except in the smallest companies. In most cases of SME and large enterprises, there is a VP, a director or sometimes a "chapter lead" pushing it (in my experience, 9/10 times they believe this push will get them a promotion, as they "helped to move the company towards an important new technology"); has nothing to do with resumes.
