> It's just not hip anymore, because it wasn't invented within the past 36 months.

Yes, technology moves in cycles but statements like this grossly generalize.

The amount of Javascript running on the web has exploded over the last decade plus to the point that frameworks like React were released to create more modern, interactive experiences because that's what business demanded. Then the industry started figuring out that the virtual DOM was kind of a scam from a performance standpoint and started looking for ways to achieve better performance and SEO, which brought us back to SSR and more advanced client/server architectures like this.