This is, effectively, what Meteor (JS) does; just with MongoDB instead of SQL. It embeds a mini-MongoDB JS client on the frontend to store cached data, queries are ran against that, and missing data is requested, streamed, and rendered asynchronously.

I'll scream from the rooftops: Yes. Meteor has its shortcomings, MongoDB being a big one, but this pattern of unification is so fantastic for every party involved that even reading about the "new-fangled acronym for building apps" disappoints me.

Now, we've got the JAM Stack (that's the new one, right?): you got your separate web frontend and service-oriented backend, probably communicating over GraphQL, then you've got your database language, probably SQL, but wait, lets put Prisma in front of that so that speaks GraphQL, but it'll be a different GraphQL schema than your frontend because you don't want to expose data, and jeeze maybe serverless functions as well, that sounds good, and i'll just stop typing here because the level of complexity and intricacy we've reached just to build a fully-featured web application is far beyond useful.

The new-generation tools we've built to make development easy for teams of 200 engineers now demand that every team have 200 engineers. Its a self-fulfilling prophecy; congratulations, you just universally raised the cost of software for every human on the planet.

A few days ago, I installed Nextcloud on a little $10/month Digital Ocean instance. I'm blown away by the performance this PHP app puts down. Blown. Away. Using Google Drive, a pretty damn "snappy" app relatively speaking, feels like walking through mud in comparison, and lets not even go down the rabbit hole of the billion dollar data centers and 56 core Xeon Platinum processors behind Google Drive.

Modern web stacks fail along every metric, except "how easy is this for our massive team of developers to maintain." (Of course, they don't actually "fail"; we developers just move the goalposts so 'master' passes, future changes might fail it but we can fix that). They're insane to get started on, hard to maintain, hard to monitor, and at the end of the day have far worse performance for end-users. We started with the monolithic systems which share a ton between server and client, decided those were a mistake, then overindexed in the entire opposite direction instead of iteratively addressing what was wrong with them.

I predict a move back in the opposite direction. The situation has become insane, and I want PHP, Meteor, and Rails. Fortunately, they're all still there, but Meteor has mostly fallen into maintenance mode (not to mention, MongoDB), and JavaScript really doesn't have another solution like this.