I can also work faster with the React ecosystem (and find it much more enjoyable) than RoR and SSR makes the end result the same anyway.
People like component-based frameworks and modern JavaScript (and its supersets). Things are different now. Deal with it!
We, your users, do deal with it. Constantly. Usually, we deal with it by waiting 30 seconds for your single-page application blog article to load because we only get intermittent 3G reception on the metro.
I don't really care what sort of frameworks you like. Stop building shit webapps!
The problem you have is that people are not implementing SSR on their websites and they don't host all of their assets.
That said. Even Gmail is on the order of seconds for being useful nowadays...
* It takes 2.53 seconds from hitting enter to being able to see my inbox.
* It takes 9.96 seconds from hitting enter and clicking compose for the new message window to pop up.
* It takes a whopping 15.95 seconds from hitting enter until the new message window pops up if you use the the following link: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=new
Those times are pretty damn terrible. Even worse, this is with a primed cache!
13 seconds to the compose window for me. Fuck me...
Trying it out with Chromium, it loaded the direct link after 3.88 seconds. Trying it out with Safari, it loaded the direct link after 6.27 seconds.
Firefox is pretty fast most of the time. Google's web apps are the only things that performs so poorly on it. I don't understand how they can have such a drastic performance disparity between browsers. Maybe they're just not testing enough on Firefox.
It would be one thing if I felt like I was getting something fancy for my wait. I don't.
Yo modern Javascripters:
Stop building crappy, slow and/or unreliable SPAs.
Maybe afterwards you could tell everybody to "deal with it".
Telling people "we don't like your broken crap" is one way of dealing with it.
The user still receives a page of HTML and CSS, and then JavaScript is loaded.