Your comment dovetails with my primary point: how an app serializes or renders data is entirely trivial compared to planning for network availability issues when it comes to app function and user experience.
GP asks: "is it ever acceptable to round-trip to the server to re-render a component that could have been updated fully-client side?" This is a question that's oriented around what is generated on the server and pushed over the wire rather than the fact that there is a network call at all.
If the network is not stable, a typical 1st-load-heavy SPA-framework will make... a tenuous network call returning JSON with iffy chances of success instead of a tenuous network call returning an HTML fragment with iffy chances of success.