Maybe that's an unfair genralisation from a small percent of poorly written SPAs, but that small percent have really had me hankering for multiple page websites with judicious use of JS.
things like loading a whole mapping library, when it's used on one page that maybe 10% of users will ever even load that page. or things like moment.js when all you want to do is get the last day of the month, but need to load that whole library.
then there's the whole, I'm just writing a restaurant website with 3 pages, but let's engineer it with a whole frontend framework and 4 dozen 600kb libraries.
There are a lot of real apps out there, usually in enterprise, or b2b, that the amount of that first page load is actually saved over the course of a users day, possibly an hour, because that app is their job essentially.
IMHO in most of the large corporate environments where I've worked, managers are constantly bucking for a promotion. It always seems like the design and IA are left out in order to keep budgets low with a focus on delivery.
Traditional multipage apps don't get that same "bad rap" in my mind because, while the upper-bound on performance is likely lower than SPAs, the lower-bound is likely higher than SPAs.