Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components

React Server Components always felt uncomfortable to me because they make it hard to look at a piece of JavaScript code and derive which parts of it are going to run on the client and which parts will run on the server.

It turns out this introduces another problem too: in order to get that to work you need to implement some kind of DEEP serialization RPC mechanism - which is kind of opaque to the developer and, as we've recently seen, is a risky spot in terms of potential security vulnerabilities.

I do think RSC and server side rendering in general was over adopted.

Have a Landing/marketing page? Then, yes, by all means render on the server (or better yet statically render to html files) so you squeeze every last millisecond you can out of that FCP. Also easy to see the appeal for ecommerce or social media sites like facebook, medium, and so on. Though these are also use cases that probably benefit the least from React to begin with.

But for the "app" part of most online platforms, it's like, who cares? The time to load the JS bundle is a one time cost. If loading your SaaS dashboard after first login takes 2 seconds versus 3 seconds, who cares? The amount of complexity added by SSR and RSC is immense, I think the payout would have to be much more than it is.