I think you're right on the money—those bad web apps that told people emphatically "do NOT use your browser's back button!" did the rest of us a lot of damage, as I really do agree that it trained many people to never press it unless they actually want to leave the app they're using.

I myself am guilty of (about 14 years ago now) giving an SPA a "reload" button, which had it go and fetch clean copies of the current view from the server. It was a social app; new comments and likes would automatically load in for the posts already visible, but NEW posts would NOT be loaded in, as they would cause too much content shift if they were to load in automatically.

Admittedly this is not a great solution, and looking back on it now, I can think of like 10 different better ways to solve that issue… but perhaps some users of that site are seeing my comment here, so yeah, guilt admitted haha.

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