I was so used to building SPAs and APIs, that it seemed the default to me. But I always felt it was slowing me down, I had to switch between multiple terminals, multiple editor windows, things had to be tested twice (on both FE and BE). I dropped that for just plain old MVC on the backend, and I find myself moving a lot fast now. I still need some JavaScript for things like dropdown, or the occasional AJAX call, but other than that, I actively try to avoid it.