If all you have is React, everything looks like a SPA.
I honestly think the real problem is that we have a whole generation of web devs that really only know react.
I honestly think the real problem is that we have a whole generation of web devs that really only know react.
React was invented to save facebook money on the billions of requests they get by sending minimal json data and having JavaScript do all the rendering. Under facebook I can understand it because it will save them millions in bandwidth but for 99.99999% of other websites it makes no sense.
Also another reason for React was to devalue front-end developers and make them easier to replace.
That's kind of typical of retained mode user interfaces. To this day that's kind of how things like QT and GTK kind of work. There are things like data binding, etc. But that's what they do under the hood.
When you are working like that it's easy to forget to do mutations on specific UI components or to make mistakes about the mutation that has to happen.
React handles the mutations, it takes your code, feeds it the current state and gets back what the ui should look like, and then it does a diff with what's on screen and updates accordingly.
If you are coming from game development you are probably used to immediate mode UIs where you specify and update the entire user interface every time.
I have a moderately complex web application, lot's of heavy compute in the backend, in which I wrote a perfectly fine browser based vanilla JavaScript UI that is performant and does everything the application needs. However, ordinary users see it and say "it looks so old, like early web" and they literally don't want to be seen using "such old looking software". Their reason for rejection is a fashion argument, they think it makes them look old using it.
Okay, so I go looking for a front end developer to make my vanilla js look more modern, and I can't afford anybody except 3rd world React developers, who work amazingly fast and build my UI as fast as I can tell them what I need. The front end code is now 2-3 times larger than the backend, the UI looks just like all the other single page applications, and my new beta users are finally treating the project like this is viable new software and not some franken-monster of old and new. I actually receive useful feedback now, rather than complains that it "looks so old".
Meanwhile, as an atypical user, I would much enjoy seeing more stuff like: https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/
(Certainly in contrast--literal contrast--to some of the flat affordance-less stuff these days.)