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?

It’s really not more productive.

Working with react has a higher barrier of entry (something which is becoming less true over time given that many templates etc exist for it), but if you want to be producing pages and functionality, a good react dev will run leagues around even an a exceptionally good jquery dev.

I’m solid at both and we are talking a dev cycle that is magnitudes faster once you are set up reasonably well. There’s a reason it’s popular. Typescript makes a lot of testing unnecessary and gives many guarantees on robustness. React makes it a breeze to create complex state full components. Nextjs makes it super easy to deploy all this to a web app and quickly create new pages.

> a good react dev will run leagues around even an a exceptionally good jquery dev

It probably depends on the use case, no?

If you only need links, forms, and data tables what advantage does React have over SSR + jQuery?

Composabilty and abstraction. I can bang out a react form in our app in minutes just by defining the shape of the fields. All the loading states are handled automatically. Mutations and refreshing data works out of the box. Navigating between pages is instant. Data is cached even when navigating between pages. Some pages that require many user inputs utilize optimistic updates to afford very low latency feedback.

React makes all of that easy to compose. I tell it how to render my state, and I write code that updates state.

On the other hand, using React means you'll have a 2nd source of state (form & navigation at the very least) that needs to be maintained and tested for edge cases. Everything needs to be validated 2x, since you can't trust anything coming from a client anyway. Correct state management between page navigations is definitely not something you get for free judging from the number of broken React SPAs where you can't properly use multiple tabs or other browser mechanisms.