I guess my overall point here was that you can build a sufficiently interactive webapp without a bloated, client-side, MVC, virtualDOM, JS monstrosity.
Given the fact that most of the bloated JS monstrosities you're talking about are also the most popular websites around (Facebook, Google, Pinterest), I think this assumption might be wrong.
Do you have any examples of popular, complex web apps that work the way you suggest is better? Why is it that Facebook etc don't make things that work the way you're talking about?