The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app

> I like to argue that some of the most productive days of the web were the PHP and JQuery spaghetti days

I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.

Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.

Has anyone gone back to working like that?

I think the old way works well for a smaller scale app that doesn't need to change often. Otherwise, I find the components-based code reuse to be a pretty valuable pattern, especially when working as a team.