Yes, I know that this can be made to work properly, in principle. The problem is that it requires effort that most web devs are apparently unwilling to spend. So in practice things are just broken.
An auction site I use loads in the list of auctions after the rest of the page loads in, and also doesn't let you open links with middle click or right click>new tab, because the anchor elements don't have href attributes. So that site is a double-dose of having to open auctions in the same tab, then going back to the list page and losing my place in the list of auctions due to the late load-in and failure to save my scroll location.
My hypothesis is that they’ve had to deal with so many random web apps breaking the back button so that behaviour is no longer intuitive for them. So I don’t push back against in-app back buttons any more.
I myself am guilty of (about 14 years ago now) giving an SPA a "reload" button, which had it go and fetch clean copies of the current view from the server. It was a social app; new comments and likes would automatically load in for the posts already visible, but NEW posts would NOT be loaded in, as they would cause too much content shift if they were to load in automatically.
Admittedly this is not a great solution, and looking back on it now, I can think of like 10 different better ways to solve that issue… but perhaps some users of that site are seeing my comment here, so yeah, guilt admitted haha.
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