I have lots of thoughts about this, as I’ve also put a ton of work into adding SSR / isomorphism to lemmy-ui.

IMO, the browser, javascript, css, and html can’t die fast enough. They’ve gotten so incredibly bloated and insecure, and there’s no coming back from that.

Unfortunately though, we do have to build tools on platforms that people actually use.

In order to make coding for the web bearable, people invented templating engines / single page web apps / front end frameworks, in order to get the benefits of real programming language techniques for building UIs. Things like react, angular, solid, or mustache.

But these SPAs have a big problem: they require everyones browser to do a lot of work, before the page will even appear. So SSR lets a back end, usually a node server, build and serve the entire front end to the user, using the same code that the users browser would use.

But also unfortunately, these two worlds never line up exactly, so a lot of work and custom solutions have to be built to fill in the gaps.

All this could have been avoided if microsoft didn’t bork application security in the 90s, which lead people to never trust installing native applications on desktop PCs. Luckily for the most part, android and iOS aren’t committing that same mistake.