I don't agree. A classic PHP-as-it-was-used-15-years-ago site either loads or fails for every user request. That isn't good enough any more. An SPA either loads or fails for the first request, but then they do a lot of things that can mitigate a patchy internet connection - prefetching content, offline mode, bundling things to reduce the number requests, etc. A server-side rendered app doesn't take advantage of those optimisations, although things like rel="prefetch" are starting to get used more which helps a lot.
Like the article suggests, there's definitely some middle ground where enough of the site is loaded on the first request for it to work, and then more things can happen in the background to make subsequent interactions faster and more reliable. That isn't a pure SPA and it isn't a pure SSR site either.
Very few SPAs give proper user feedback. There could be any number of silent errors in the background.
It's even evident for relatively basic things such as infinite scroll. Users on sketchy connections won't even see all the items in a web store if their mobile connection is sketchy enough, and they will never even know it.
There are some real costs here. Had anyone seriously A/B tested these things they wouldn't be so widespread.
Very few SPAs give proper user feedback. There could be any number of silent errors in the background.
Badly built apps that ignore errors and don't work well for users are certainly not limited to SPAs, and blaming SPA tech for that seems a bit unreasonable.
For "classical" websites, it was not possible to screw it up. The feeback was always there - clear, unmistakable, universal across sites. Boom, "No Internet", site's gone. Press "back" to get the previous state and click again/resubmit later. And it was nice that you could actually do that - use the "back" button to revert to the last correct state even without an Internet connection. Can't do that with almost any SPA these days.
I suppose it just boils down to the fact that with more freedom comes more freedom to fuck things up. But when you see an industry systematically fucking things up, and being driven by economic incentives that encourage fucking things up, one has to wonder whether some of those freedoms should be taken away.
The feeback was always there - clear, unmistakable, universal across sites.
It wasn't clear for lots of users. There were common stories of people getting a connection error and refreshing a page only to find their order on an ecommerce site had been taken twice, or that a comment they'd made had been submitted a second time, or that a request to delete something had actually worked but the second request threw up an error because it couldn't be deleted again so it looked like it had failed. These aren't so much of an issue today because browsers warn about form resubmission, but let's not forget that server-side rendered websites in the past were absolutely riddled with UX problems and bugs.
That's not a defence of SPAs, far too many still get the basics wrong, but if you believe it was better when devs made "classical" sites I think there's some decidedly rose-tinted nostalgia going on.
