Everyone(well almost) wants a SPA or at the very least non reloading pages. No one wants to reload the page with every action they perform or if only a part of the area on screen needed to be updated and the page was reloaded anyways.
That's what developers talk about. What normal people care about is the user experience: did an action take a long time, did it reset their context or fail into a confusing state, does the reload button work / can they share a link with someone else, etc.
That's an important distinction because using an SPA means an order of magnitude more code has to work perfectly before it's not a regression on one of those points. It's a lot easier than it used to be but, as we've seen over and over again, there are still many cases where people have a bad experience because the developer assumed everyone is fine downloading 5MB of JavaScript before displaying text & images, errors never happen, etc.
To me it just seems that most SPAs that I see, are either so small that the page load of a django app would also be fast enough, or they are so overloaded with stuff and advertising, that I feel like the performance benefit of SPAs has just been reinvested in cluttering more. Also, facebook, who built react, don't seem to have embraced the SPA.
I guess there will be a sweet spot, also on whether you build "pages" or "apps". Maybe there is a point of interactivity that warrants a SPA. I just don't feel like many websites hit this, like microblogging/twitter/etc.
well not 'no one'. When 90% of the page is to be replaced, a full reload gives better feedback and synchronicity.
Yes, I know there are some stellar SPAs that actually work. But I can't see why they're necessary 97% of the time and it really bothers me when I see a SPA where one isn't needed that breaks basic functionality like back buttons and right-click and all that other jazz.
I've seen people that care if you create a SPA that shows a spinner for 10s before allowing the user to get any of your content, but those are not as numerous as Google's webmaster tools makes one think.
I've seen plenty of people that are perfectly fine with a page spinning for 90s before getting any content if the page has the data they care about.
So, any out of context claim like "everyone wants a SPA" is wrong.