90% of Web applications are database frontends.
What they do to the end user might be different, how the pieces come together, it is always the same, unless one is doing curriculum driven development.
What they do to the end user might be different, how the pieces come together, it is always the same, unless one is doing curriculum driven development.
Forget everything about responsiveness or whatever (which I find way more valuable than the tradeoffs one makes)--the lack of tight coupling is the real win of React and similar. I mean, if you'd like you can pretty easily build a server-side React app with NextJS and still get a lot of these benefits while using React purely as a pretty-dang-good templating language.
Old school server side rendered apps are underrated and its perfectly possible to make something that looks and behaves as well as a SPA app for most things.
Even in the case where you do have a specific frontend, I contend that there's still value in the separation because it very strongly encourages (coupled with tools like, shameless plug, nestjs-data-sec[0]) the writing of very clear viewmodels where thought must be put into what exactly should be exposed over the wire in a way that commingling database objects and template logic doesn't allow.
I think server-side rendered pages are properly rated at this point, not underrated; there are places to use them but they're shrinking as other tooling get better. As an example, even I write React almost exclusively because I write React faster and with fewer errors than any templating language I see in common use except maybe Razor (and Razor implies buying into ASP.NET, which, no). React/TypeScript are hard to get wrong and easy to burn through quickly. And I would call a React page rendered through NextJS a "server-side rendered app"--but I get the feeling you would not. ;)