I find react the easiest, and cleanest way to do the SPA stuff, and it's much easier to get anything done with it than building MPAs.
If SPAs had better perf than MPAs, I can assure you Amazon (the store) would be an SPA. But SPAs are notoriously slow, specially if built with React. Amazon tested React and it was too slow for them so they kept using Java for SSR + jQuery. I think they removed jQuery recently, but keep using the same approach of SSR + sprinkled JS.
As for dev complexity, I'd be very surprised if that was the case. Are taking into account writing the backend code or only the frontend? What about client-side data caching? What about spinners? What about mismatched version of the app for users that don't close their tabs all day long? Etc. Etc.
Yes I know all problems with SPAs have solutions. But that's the point the article is making: you have to solve it.
What technology does the Instragram in-app shopping experience use?
Because whatever that is, it is 10x better than the Amazon app.
Amazon's websites, mobile and desktop, and app, are all horrible compared to the competition. Slow, hard to navigate, long load times, I wouldn't use Amazon as a point of reference for anything.
What I do know is that the Amazon mobile website, while ugly and outdated in many respects, runs ways better in my crap Android phone than probably 99% of SPAs.
I don't know, but it's probable the "Instragram in-app shopping experience" has better UX. Although that's not really what we're discussing here, are we?
Google also doesn't use react. The ads stack is written in C++, for fb it's hack + c++, neither of which are the right tools for majority of use cases.
But on top of that with C# and razor you've got strongly typed intellisense that just works which means rapidly building the templates which you just cannot achieve when making a spa.
In other use cases, which there are plenty, different sets of rules dominate. There are plenty of places where SPAs provide a much better user experience than MPA.
I find SPAs simpler to do than MPAs if it fits the use case.
To me, it's not a matter of performance one way or the other (server lag vs. overweight client). I'll deal with those issues when I come to them. What I care about is the ago-old problem of cohesion and coupling. I want the user-facing stuff in one place so that I can write and maintain it, closely cohering to itself and loosely coupled to the other parts of the system.
I'm a frontend dev and I work with React all day long. I still think MPAs and stuff like HotWire/Livewire/etc should be enough for like 90% of what we do. Being the last 10% offline first or Google Maps/ Figma level of interactivity apps.