[skylark]

You're absolutely right - SPA bloat isn't directly due to the weight of the underlying frameworks.

I think what I was touching on more was the fact that SPAs generally encourage engineering practices which lead to more complexity and page bloat, and that many teams don't think about these maintenance difficulties when initially picking their tech stack (as proven by the number of bloated, slow SPAs on the internet.)

A well engineered SPA won't suffer from the issues I outlined in the original post, but getting to that point has a non-trivial cost which has to be considered. As usual, it's all about picking the right tool for the job - teams need to make sure they're getting a net benefit from using this sort of application architecture vs. a server oriented one.