I'm super intrigued by the client-side/server-side rendering question. When I discovered single page apps I thought I'd seen the future - servers were just things that hosted web services, and all the presentation was a bundled, minimized blob served up by a static CDN. So simple, so clean, such clear separation of concerns. But now I'm seeing reports of faster first page rendering with React server than React client, and here I'm seeing a clearly very smart person articulating a completely different class of benefit of server-side rendering. Clearly I shouldn't be walking away from old style server side rendering so casually. My question is how do you think about that choice, now that we have the freedom to go either direction?
It's certainly interesting. This kind of development has gone full circle where the methodologies are back to where it was years ago.
The issues that really large JS bundles can cause are really hard to solve (bloated sizes, but also parse time of the bundles). There are a lot of tools to help mitigate those like code splitting, but it's really challenging once things get big.
When I wanted to achieve a 100 in my chrome performance audit, I simply couldn't include React.
I think React adds a tremendous amount of value from the ecosystem, the constant improvements and updates .. and the mindset that developers have when building out react applications. (component model, etc)
I think for any really large application with lots of client side interactions or async data / data management, my solution would become unwieldy.
But for smaller applications that maybe don't need to do as much, (in the above case we're simply registering some event listeners to submit a form) or landing pages or the like .. the above solution would work very well.
