The first argument leads to waiting to see anything vs at least seeing something. Many use cases the latter is preferable.
The second case is a common misconception of modern SPA. Code-splitting has been around for a while now. When split across routes it's trivial to implement.
In practice, the SPA is so slow and the user's device is so much slower than the datacenter that the "something" you see is a useless splash screen, and the actual content takes longer to arrive than just doing it SSR.
Reddit is probably the most familiar example of this, because it actually has multiple implementations (old.reddit, i.reddit etc) that let you see the difference!
I am wary of gleaning anything on the matter from Reddit. Their engineering decisions don't fit either the convention nor the needs of most web applications.
As for whether the initial paint is of value, that comes down to product and implementation. Nothing is faster than offline-first or local cache, which SSR does not have a good narraative for.
"at least seeing something" leads to jira or teams where you open a thing and then its entries slowly pop in and shift as they get loaded. An illusion of a site being there that can't be used because you can neither focus on the text nor use any of the inputs as they shift beneath your eyes.
That'd be a poor implementation. CSR can generate immediately interactive forms that don't shift. JIRA and MS are absolutely subpar irregardless of this matter.
They work fine for everything that doesn't require immediate response on first load, and even the there are ways to address that - for instance special pages for entry points and/or loading indicators.
For general performance you can cache the modules using a service worker.
That's exactly what my team told me when we transitionned to an SPA. Turns out, splitting properly an SPA is complex and bundling is pretty annoying at the moment.
Why? I think most modern bundlers and spa routers supports code splitting out of the box by just using dynamic imports, aka:
`const myComponent = await import("/path/to/component")`
I don't understand your concern with it and why this is a problem.
I haven't personally noticed the vite/esbuild memory consumption, but I also run build only once at the end before deployment or generating the prod artifacts.
It wouldn't be an issue if other work tools were taking absolutely nothing yes but as it is now, 16GB of RAM with a JS oriented stack isn't enough anymore.
And getting more RAM is just delaying the problem anyways since it takes more RAM every week as the product evolves.
Yeah we all collectively had a look at it and there's not a lot of solutions available. The bundler needs to bundle everything at some point and you are going to pay the SPA tax.
That's why I personally don't recommend SPAs, it introduce a whole other class of issues on top of what you usually deal with. Google makes it work with Gmail and Youtube but it's Google, they can throw infinite engineers at any problem and could make those in pretty much anything.
I agree there is a complexity cost for bundlers. Whether to pay it is an equation that roughly aligns with how robust and interactive your client offering needs to be. Applications probably, websites probably not.
We're a web application and even with those, I'm not sure the bundling is worth it. Customers in some regions complain about the high payload, we made sure the chunks are split properly but with continuous deployment, there's a lot of cache invalidation anyways.
The second case is a common misconception of modern SPA. Code-splitting has been around for a while now. When split across routes it's trivial to implement.