I'm a web developer who avoids this sad trend wherever possible. I see two reasons for this: 1) the development experience for things like React is so 'smooth' that many developers use it even when it's not necessary at all (I'm referring to things like hot-reloading and custom components which are more complicated to set up with pre-processors) 2) some animations and advanced interactivity have become expected of us, but instead of tacking it on later, which makes the code objectively less clean, they build everything in JS, making it perform like shit and leading to things like the infamous gray bars placeholder.

But it can be done right. dev.to is a great example of an interactive web application with all the bells and whistles, yet it still performs better than most static sites.