A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
so, this isn’t so much a design as it is a consequence of how a lot of the technologies involved operate (as in, it’s (largely) not a conscious choice for those things to do that shifting (except in the cases of deceptive designs)), but you’re fairly correct in that it fucking sucks to have that interaction with sites/systems (because of violates principle of least surprise, etc)
(and probably also sometimes/often falls into that bucket of things where “it works perfectly fine on the dev’s 27” laptop with 16 cores and 32gb of RAM and the DC is next door" development applies)