> Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and deeply painful.
Given my experience users can be delighted in 2019 by well-designed and lightweight UI built with just CSS and vanilla JS, instead of an overweight buggy SPA (usually built by engineers more interested by the code itself than solving the business problem in the leanest way). Source: I made that my business and I couldn’t be happier.
You're exceeding their expectations by providing less than they expected. That's easy to do when the user expects to be accosted by a slow loading page that comes onto his screen janky because of deferred stylesheets and 4 different Google fonts and 1.6mb worth of ads.
SPAs are often buggy, but you can’t honestly blame React/Angular for that. I’ve built and actively maintain a number of SPAs in React. With some care JS size and speed is very manageable even in mobile devices.
The thing that consistently kills site performance is ads and trackers. Of the sites I work on, GTM, Optimizely, FullStory, and other similar crap routinely are responsible for >75% of the JS weight and >90% of the HTTP requests. It doesn’t matter how much I prune our npm dependencies and tweak React to make sure it’s rendering fast—marketing is going to make the page suck and I can’t do anything about it besides generate page speed reports that the client will ignore.
Given my experience users can be delighted in 2019 by well-designed and lightweight UI built with just CSS and vanilla JS, instead of an overweight buggy SPA (usually built by engineers more interested by the code itself than solving the business problem in the leanest way). Source: I made that my business and I couldn’t be happier.