Some frontend guy said this best. It was something along the lines of:
"JS frameworks went real hard in client side rendering and branding server-side rendering old and archaic. But that they hit performance issues and began re-adopting server side features and trying to make it look cool again after shitting on it for a decade."
I’ve got nothing against SSR, never have, but CSR or even better SSR+CSR side steps a metric shit ton of issues. I’ve written untold lines of code to render something out in PHP then needed to add jQuery logic to the frontend for UX/UI reasons and then I’ve had to duplicate UI generation in JS/jQuery to match what PHP spits back (think: add a new row to an interface after an Ajax call finishes). It’s hell, you have to keep the two in sync and it’s a bug minefield.
Compare that to CSR where all the DOM is generated though a single codepath. Now take CSR to the next level with SSR+CSR and you’ve got a winning combo. Fast initial render and SEO gains (if you even need that) and only 1 DOM generation pathway.
People want to sound all smug “Oh, back to SSR are we?”, “Uh yeah, we had to CSR first to get to SSR+CSR which is VASTLY superior to SSR alone”.
Tech is circular in that way. See also mainframes, to personal computers, to cloud or any other similar cycle.
Give it a year or two and we will be back to PHP. A lot of people are seeing the massive changes PHP has done and realizing it's just not as bad as it used to be. 7.x was a huge change, and 8.x is also doing great things. And so no one rages about my opinions, there's some sarcasm about "going back to PHP". Obviously the industry will stick to JS/TS for the most part.
Yes. Much like
https://xkcd.com/224/
the Internet is ostensibly all clever JavaScript frameworks, but actually leans heavily in out-of-sight places on big piles of plain old HTML.
Much like SQL, there's a million tools that will generate HTML, until we need a really specific output. Then we just cram the exact output we need into a text file and call it a day.