This is wild to me because it feels so obvious that even asking the question in the first place seems redundant and pointless, but like … somehow even so it’s not widely understood. So I guess it’s good to have hard data backing it up.

Now, it’s very important to note that while the examples in this post helpfully display this pattern, the architectural decisions of these sites are made thoughtfully by highly-skilled teams. Web development involves tradeoffs, and in some cases a team may deem the initial performance impact of JS-dependence a worthy compromise for benefits they get in other areas, such as personalized content, server costs and simplicity, and even performance in long-lived sessions.

I thought this blob was more important. Look only at initial load times does not tell the whole story—especially for your specific project requirements. I would like to see less JS-oriented sites where it’s completely unnecessary ala many developer project landing pages made with React or Vue where you can’t get any information without JS despite the whole purpose being to inform users about the project. And just as much I want good SPAs to continue to be SPAs, and some SPAs, like Reddit mobile to go back to a hybrid approach where JS is a useful enhancement.