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it's a modern version of asp.net web forms.

No. The serialization of state from the server to the client is the only parallel. The serialization is simpler and more efficient and doesn’t round-trip. And you get rich interactivity and a first class component model and (presumably) TypeScript.

this is my understanding as well! but i might be wrong.

Asp.net webform where not really interactive. Any change to the UI require reloading the page.

It is nothing like ASP.NET web forms... the server is not keeping any state here between requests, it simply renders the page and serialises the state, event handlers and such in a way that the client can pick them up and resume execution.

When the client either lazy loads (on interaction) or prefetches these serialised event handlers, there is no server work at all, it's simply static js files.

ASPnet webforms kept the state serialized in a hidden field in on the page

Right, but the reason it was kept in a hidden field was that it would then go to the server on form submission and the server would persist it across requests, if I recall correctly – haven't done ASP.NET in more than a decade.

Either way, that was a form of hydration itself I suppose, the server would send this state value to the client and the client would hydrate its view to match the state.

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