I think it's less of a distinctly populist thing and more of a "convert's zeal". I have seen this type of language used with a lot of different technologies over the years when there's a lot of hype and momentum around them.

Ultimately there's just a lot of tradeoffs to make in this space and I'm glad that we have more options now. For awhile it seemed like you were either doing SPAs or everyone thought you were doing it "wrong", but things like HTMX, LiveView, Livewire, and Hotwire make it much easier to build good backend driven web apps.

Inertia.js 2.0 is a really compelling middle ground as well & IMO is the best thing to come out of Laravel. You can get most of the benefits of a JS "metaframework", but you have adapters for many different backend and frontend frameworks.