I just thought of a possible reason. Maybe because the internet is generally much faster and lower latency these days? So rendering on a server can provide a good UX today, but it couldn't in 2007? Was "the edge" such a prominent concept back then? I honestly don't know if this is a good explanation or not, I have no data at hand to prove it, but I think it makes sense.
The "edge" didn't really exist at the time, along with concepts like cloud, serverless. I seem to remember that even CDN was an evolving architecture idea at the time.
AWS et al had not yet turned web servers into a commodity, so it wasn't feasible to "just deploy the software to multiple regions" to improve latency.
