the screen refreshed every time you browsed to new content or did something that required accessing new content, as one would intuitively expect
And if it's that important that EVERYBODY deploys JS to render client side to avoid the refreshes, why isn't this handled at the browser level in the first place (i.e. declare "ExtendDisplayTime"-something on your document and the browser should replace the screen content only AFTER the new page is completely painted).
But at the core of it, the web is a document-display system, and back-hammering and shoe-horning apps that masquerade as documents will always be painful.