> It’s like we suddenly and collectively became afraid of the page reload on websites

I used to work at a place where page reloads was constantly an issue brought up as a negative. They couldn't be bothered to fix the slow page loads and instead avoided page changes.

I argued several times that we should improve performance instead of caring about page reloads, but never got through to anyone (in fairness, it was probably mostly cos of a senior dev there).

At some point a new feature was being developed, and instead of just adding it to our existing product, it was decided to use an iframe with the new feature as a separate product embedded.