I’ve seen a few times where a company replaced one guy using a Rails monolith with jQuery and replaced em with a 30 person team that is far less effective.
Nowadays there are alternative middle ground solutions such as Livewire, Hotwire, LiveView, Unpoly, Htmx, etc which provide a great way to organize the code and keep it maintainable.
Amusingly enough at $Current_Job the JSON we send back that is larger in size than the HTML it's rendered into. We'd likely have better performance doing all server side rendering + Turbolinks.
At a previous job, we had a many, many thousand lines codebase of typescript, redux, observables, epics, thunks, custom server API libraries, websockets, Elixir backend, Kafka to communicate with other microservices, etc, etc..for...a frigging signup wizard.
Which then failed in so many stupid ways, had almost no server validation (everything unexpected was a 500) and it took days to do the smallest of the changes. But hey, don't dare to suggest doing this with Laravel would take 2% of the effort because you'd be crucified in the next frontend guild meeting.
I think that if we were more pragmatic and less about following the current fashion or trying to do what FANG does (which probably is just the opposite of what everyone else needs) we wouldn't be in such a high need of developers... which... I shouldn't be saying out loud probably :-)