> I like to argue that some of the most productive days of the web were the PHP and JQuery spaghetti days

I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.

Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.

Has anyone gone back to working like that?

I wonder why the article doesn't mention utilizing the browser cache for your static CSS and JS assets instead of introducing a service worker as first measure.

Few years ago I built a shopping site MPA this way and the page transitions were almost not noticable.

Full title is "You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths"

Omission of trailing part changes the meaning and makes it clickbaity.

Can someone explain what the service worker strategy accomplishes that plain old http Cache headers don't? It saves a (almost zero weight) network roundtrip, but feels like it's re-inventing the entire wheel for that small (I think) optimization? Am I missing something?

The most dangerous thing in programming is developer boredom with a dash of hubris and ignorance of the past.