My perspective on this debate is both client-side and server-side with only a backend API layer is required. The problem with most Js MVC frameworks are they enforce/make it easy to do client side rendering, but make it difficult/impossible to integrate server-side.

I have found that increasing the DOM element count leads to poor performance, hence too much view template loaded initially leads to unnecessary slowness. To mitigate this i started dynamic loading of view templates from the server, which lead to two different calls to the server, one to retrieve the json data and the other to retrieve the view template which makes some sense in certain use cases and sometime merging the data with the template makes it more performant and some case retrieving the template and data in a single call, but without merging is optimum. It all depends on the functionality required.

When you work in Old Android (Browser/WebView) devices, you will observe that using client side rendering and loading too much in the DOM leads to poor performance and it is better to render it on the server side and just use plain JavaScript to inject the rendered view to DOM, which leads to optimum performance.