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It's not that there's an additional layer, the rendering of the view was always there, just tightly coupled to fetching data from the DB.

It is now a better practice to create a BFF that can serve more clients than just browsers.

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It's not tightly coupled to the database, it's just not on the browser. And because they aren't tightly coupled, you can still make the renderer the client of your REST/gRPC API just as you would the browser. Or it may be more practical to have your non-browser clients talking to your API while your renderer talks directly to the database.

Your second choice is just coupling it again. I've only seen few frameworks that let you render both HTML and json (Ruby on Rails).

You still have to map a model to HTML, regardless.

Yes, that's my point. Decoupling it for the purpose of supporting multiple frontends may not be more practical than leaving it coupled and providing an API for other frontends.

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