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Your average veteran "front end engineer" has implemented las month half a dozen features that almost impossible to do server-side only, "just send the HTML, dude".

Progressive enhancement, forms with fields depending on other fields, real time updates, automated retries when the backend is down, advanced date selectors, maps with any kind of interactivity.

Any of the above is an order of magnitude harder to do backend-only vs backend API + any frontend.

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Who says you can't use any JS when doing server side rendering?

And why would you even want progressive enhancement if you can just send the proper full version right away, without waiting for MBs of JS to "hydrate" and "enhance" the page

You know, you went direct for the "bait" case, while ignoring all the others.

Progressive enhancement is often done to mask the fact that fetching the data takes an unacceptable amount of time, otherwise no effort would be done to mask it.

Your plan is to take that same unacceptable time, and add the server side render-to-html time on top of it, and that will improve it via...

The server rarely has to render/build the html. It will do it once and then cache it. 99% of websites don’t have real time data. They are just boring webpages.

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