SPAs arent meant for solving the issue of offline apps and building games in web browsers. Their target was to address the difficulty of building, maintaining, extending an ever changing UI in a corporate development environment.
Having worked on a ui in this setting, built with erb, jquery, and pjax... It is not about the degree of difficulty building it, but extending/modifying it, and collaborating with multiple crews in the same codebase. These are problems enough teams have experienced that they have moved away from the approach of jquery+handlebars.
Now granted, SPAs have a bandwagon effect because of where the job opportunities are, so you get people using them not to solve those problems, but to align their technical skills with employable skills.
Having worked on a ui in this setting, built with erb, jquery, and pjax... It is not about the degree of difficulty building it, but extending/modifying it, and collaborating with multiple crews in the same codebase. These are problems enough teams have experienced that they have moved away from the approach of jquery+handlebars.
Now granted, SPAs have a bandwagon effect because of where the job opportunities are, so you get people using them not to solve those problems, but to align their technical skills with employable skills.