https://hyperfiddle.notion.site/Reactive-Clojure-You-don-t-n...
I am in the same boat as OP. Started doing web things right around the growth of rails, but spent plenty of time in my career doing Spring MVC apps. For the last 6 years or so I've been forced to build SPA's because its what's been mandated from on high, but it's to the point where I can't even explain to new devs coming in what they're missing. They can't understand how much easier it is to just make a query directly to a database while responding to a request than it is to concern yourself with explicit API calls onMount of some component. Rehydration, state management, blah. What are we even trying to solve anymore.
I'm excited by the new trend in a sort of hybrid approach where you write your code as if it all runs on the server, and the framework figures out the websocket communications that need to take place. Phoenix Livewiew, PHP Livewire, even Microsoft Blazor server. This is all admirable, but I think the hyperfiddle/photon solution is finally the right level of abstraction. It's sort of like when you start programming and try to write a parser with a bunch of if statements and it becomes a mess, then you realize that mathematicians figured all this stuff out in a really elegant way that composes and provides just a solid bedrock. We need that level of formality to get us out of the SPA/SSR tarpit.