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?
A shopping site or similar, then sure - the "one thing at a time " workflow works.
For internal line of business apps? I'm not sure sure anymore. From a comment of mine a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42148627
> Which is a pity; I was watching a client do some crud work in a webapp.
> Web - 1 form per page:
> Click "back". Copy some text. Click forward. Paste it. Repeat for 3 different fields. Click submit.
> Native apps (VB/Delphi/etc) used to be:
> Open both forms. Copy and paste from one to the other. Open another one on the side to lookup some information, etc.
> Webapps, even moreso with MPA, force a wizard-style interface - you only go forward through the form. This is not how people used to work; they would frequently have multiple forms in the same app open at the same time.
> With SPA and html "windows" made out of movable divs you can probably support multiple forms open at the same time, but who does that?
But the folks using the company's line-of-business apps mostly aren't even aware that the browser can open a particular part of the app in a new tab, and even when they are, they aren't aware that the tabs can be torn off into separate windows, and of those that do, there are still some who wouldn't figure out that both browser windows can be tiled side-by-side.
And even when you pass all those hurdles, it's still disruptive enough to the normal workflow that most people who can do that won't do it at all anyway.