Having read the article, the team just seems more experienced with frontend than backend dev. As somewhat an old school dev, I've been noticing these small fears and misunderstandings in the way FE devs think. Honestly, I believe it only takes a minor adjustment in thinking to understand how this stuff works, but I get it — many people at this point have never seen regular client/server approach in their entire careers. That said, I get the value of off-the-shelf React components, and ease of finding docs/help, so wouldn't discount that anyway.