Hacker News Reader

I do agree with this bit, even though I hate the end product.

I've seen exactly what happens when you have a server side application worked on by a lazy developer, you end up with tightly coupled code inside all your templates and controllers and it devolves into a maintenance nightmare.

This doesn't work as well as you think once you consider multiple endpoints and round trips. You're better off with something like GraphQL or server-side making the API ship views to clients.

The API between the SPA and the server is an internal implementation detail that doesn’t need to support interoperability or backwards compatibility.

I see no reason to believe interacting with it directly is easier than scraping an HTML page. (In fact, I’d expect it to actually be much harder and more fragile than scraping html in practice)

In my experience scraping both, APIs have tended to be more stable than the structure of HTML pages. I'd guess this is because there's an incentive to keep your API stable (a breaking change for my scraper is also a breaking change for the front-end), whereas there's basically no reason not to rewrite giant chunks of the HTML to accommodate a design change.