It is three step backwards. And one step to the side. Which is what I needed, and many others too.
But hindsight is 20/20. Someone may be building a beautiful language that will kill JS in the 2020s, and in 2026 we'll all be wondering why weren't using it in in early 2022.
Since we began using this approach, we can be full-stack developers again. One person can easily implement both parts, which is so much faster.
the core idea is to use hypermedia, rather than an RPC-style architecture, and that is, at the least, an interesting alternative approach to consider when creating front end code