Is it possible that that’s the joke? Unless this is unique to Vue, I’d expect that you can use an <a> tag in any framework if you want to trigger a “traditional page refresh” instead of leveraging the router to do it efficiently.
It feels like there is a lot of brigading and shilling of Astro throughout this thread, as typical with web frontend frameworks.
Then why do you need bloated web UI that's not performant as React, Vue, Angular, Svelte? You can also just add 1 line of css classes to HTML elements to have transitions if you use a library like Animate.css.