[sillyboi]

Honestly, this approach feels like it adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. It introduces a custom serialization structure that can easily lead to subtle UI bugs and a nightmare of component state tracking. The author seems to be solving two issues at once: large payloads and stream-structured delivery. But the latter only really arises because of the former.

For small to medium JSON responses, this won't improve performance meaningfully. It’s hard to imagine this being faster or more reliable than simply redesigning the backend to separate out the heavy parts (like article bodies or large comment trees) and fetch them independently. Or better yet, just use a proper streaming response (like chunked HTTP or GraphQL @defer/@stream).

In practice, trying to progressively hydrate JSON this way may solve a niche problem while creating broader engineering headaches.