Then you'd have to focus on making a website someone gives a shit about, with content worth pursuing. Instead, one can just retreat into the engineering ivory tower, making an ever purer object that ever fewer people can understand or care about.

Responsive site built via server-side render, with a particular benefit for partial page updates. 90% of the benefit of an SPA but 10% of the code: no api, no moving of system of record for state back and forth between database and browser (it's always db), etc. And you can avoid react.

A common use case: eg in Rails, a user has a table open. you can stream new records to the top of that table as they are created in ~5 lines of ruby (a broadcast on the model, and put the table rows in a turbo_frame with a turbo_stream_from somewhere on the page).

There are real limits to this -- you have to hold the update dependency graph in your head -- but the benefits are huge for small to medium amounts of responsiveness.

My experience has been great with Rails/Turbo and htmx.