The SEO argument is a strawman. Large swaths of the Internet return a blank page if you try to access them with JS turned off. Are you saying search engine crawlers haven't figured out how to deal with that?
There is nothing inherent in SPAs that make load time slower. If your REST API takes 5 seconds to serve up JSON, what's to say your SSR rendered page won't also take 5 seconds?
> Are you saying search engine crawlers haven't figured out how to deal with that?
Except for Google which has spent a tremendous amount of effort on that, yes I am.
> There is nothing inherent in SPAs that make load time slower.
I never said they are. The difference is only for crawlers which now have to run JavaScript whereas before they could just retrieve the document and index it as it was served to it instead of trying to determine when the SPA has done the full loading of the page.
Not convincing. Even a PHP page wouldn't be indexed as it was served if it loads JS scripts. And if your page isn't running JavaScript, comparing SPA and SSR is moot. One could just use one of the hundred odd HTML templating tools to produce a static page.
Till today the Google Crawler is the only one that gets even near good search results of SPAs. That's because they have to run a full browser to load every page to parse it. Every. Single. Page. That's why it is hard to do correctly. Read a bit about their current approach here:
> Keep in mind that server-side or pre-rendering is still a great idea because it makes your website faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript.
Recently in 2019 Bing Bot just gave up and is using the same approach a Google:
So nowadays having a SPA isn't as bad for SEO as it used to be, but again, and I'll keep nailing on this, that is only because we spent the entire last decade throwing millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of engineer time to make SPAs a viable option.
There is nothing inherent in SPAs that make load time slower. If your REST API takes 5 seconds to serve up JSON, what's to say your SSR rendered page won't also take 5 seconds?