My own website is a kind of hybrid SSR/SPA in PHP. Navigating pages with JS enabled (JS is entirely optional) seamlessly updates the relevant DOM nodes with an AJAX call (and uses the history API etc), but going to a page fresh is entirely PHP.

It was fun to write. Relevant code is here:

https://github.com/ldyeax/jimm.horse/blob/master/j/j.php

https://github.com/ldyeax/jimm.horse/blob/cb6a1c03504cbe6b63...

I actually uncovered a niche bug across multiple browsers with this PHP code. In at least Firefox and Edge, if a page is cached with a fetch using accept:text/json, the response will be shown from view-source of the html page you have open, even if the content is different when you fetch the page with accept:text/html

SSR usually means doing the front end JS browser render on the server, not just the more generic task of producing an initial HTML from a server.

The idea is the same code can work on front end and backend. On NextJS it will run your React on the backend but useEffects will not be called. Just the initial render is saved and piped to the browser.

I never said it either/or, in fact I’m using PHP to power an SPA right now. I was saying that pretending that PHP alone was sufficient (for both customers or dev speed) was silly.