But these days it’s actually the basic HTML mode that feels super fast. I’m not sure if this is because network and compute have improved at different speeds, or just that the js framework is super bloated.
Either way, if you haven’t tried it I’d recommend giving it a shot.
Over time the network has improved, removing the benefit of the reduced network traffic.
We still pay the runtime performance impact though. Its morphed into what modern frameworks are today and the original benefit was forgotten. Execution times have only gone up.
So with faster network speeds and increased execution time - its been flipped. It's not that it feels super fast. It's that it is super fast.
Not to mention the web is almost unoptimized. Lots of very low hanging fruit. Early this year someone wrote a series of articles[1] demonstrating how much he could imnprove just by simply looking.
[1] https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem/