I totally agree bloated SPAs are terrible and in most cases an MPA is the best option. But a bit of JS is certainly fine when it makes for a better experience. Even HN uses a bit of JS.
And what's the point of having all this bandwidth and CPU power available if we're not going to use it? (even one tiny bit)
I tend to agree but it depends.
I made a small SPA a coupe of years ago with Mithril and the whole thing is like 40kB gzipped (JS and CSS).
Both uses absolutely have their place and there are products that would be noticeably worse for the end user if all HTML was rendered on the server. I've just learned to have a high bar there, the complexity grows quickly making bugs more likely and debugging more difficult.
Do you have any metrics on this? Seems like an extremely rare edge case.
Anecdotally, I haven't experienced it in years.
That's a lot.
It’s there when you need it? Using less bandwidth and cpu means using less battery.