> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to).

A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990.

Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps.

The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices.

I'd much rather optimise for engineer ergonomics than shave a couple of milliseconds off the initial page load.