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That's disappointing. You're absolutely right that that particular page should be SSR'd.

Likely because the list of repositories changes infrequently, so it's a better candidate for caching. They serve what then can quickly, quickly, then pull in the naturally slower stuff later.

Like 5-10 years ago, writing.com updated their content from loading static pages to be more dynamic.

What they actually did was continue loading the content statically, then hide it behind a 1 or 2 second loading spinner that wasn't actually loading anything.

Seems like users have just come to expect spinners...

(I don't know how the site currently works, haven't been there in a long time)