The point of SPAs was never page transitions. I can’t name a single major SPA that does good page transitions, can you? They all just replace the content. And to take a popular SPA framework as an example, it’s almost impossible to do page transitions in Next.js because of the way routes are loaded. I know this because I added proper page transitions to Next.js and it has been an absolute nightmare.

There are two good reasons for SPAs that I can see:

1. Your app probably needs interactivity anyway; for most apps, it’s not just going to be HTML and CSS. Writing your app in some unholy combination of React and HTML is not fun especially when you need to do things like global state.

2. Loading the structure of pages up front so that subsequent data loads and requests are snappy. Getting a snappy loading screen is usually better than clicking and getting nothing for 500ms and then loading in; the opposite is true below I’d say 100ms. Not needing to replace the whole page results in better frontend performance, which can’t really be matched today with just the web platform.

Basecamp has probably invested the most in making a fairly complex webapp without going full SPA, but click around for like 30 seconds and you’ll see it can’t hold a candle in performance to SPAs, never mind native apps.

With that said, I agree that I’d want the web to work more like the web, instead of this weird layer on top. All the complexity that Next.js and SPAs have added over the years have resulted in more responsive but sometimes more tedious-to-build apps, and gigantic bundles. I just don’t think you can match the performance of SPAs yet with just HTML.