[ki_]

1. You can share templates between front & back-end using any language. (im not talking about WASM)

2. CSS has NOTHING to do with js/ts.

3. Most single page js applications require SSR anyway, otherwise you have a blank screen or spinner until the browser has downloaded & intialized everything.

Personally, i dont care if it's SSR or SPA. But the js/ts community tends to use things like webpack in combination with ~20 packages which themselfs rely on ~20 packages, resulting in index.js files that are +2MB... That's bad programming.

[flimsypremise]

Man if you think 2MB is big, you should check out the size of the build product from a compiled language. And if you have an issue with nested dependencies, you've should check out the build a Python or C application which similarly require you grab all the dependencies, and then the dependencies of the dependencies, before building. That's just what dependency management is about.

If you have a frontend app that requires loading a 2MB bundle in the browser, then whoever configured that application did not know what they are doing. There are lots of ways of optimizing JS bundle sizes, and SSR is actually one of the best. With SSR, only the code that executes on the frontend gets included in the client bundle. Webpack is one of many build orchestration frameworks you could use, though honestly at this point you rarely have to actually write custom configuration for frontend applications. A great deal of standardization has happened over the last 5 years, and generally you just use a template for your use case.

As someone who has worked all over the stack, from API development to data pipelines to infrastructure to client-facing application, I find the dismissive attitude of other parts of the stack incredibly bizarre. It's a tool, it exists for a reason, and if you don't see the reason it's probably because you don't understand the problem.