From Second-guessing the modern web by Tom MacWright:
But the cultural tides are strong. Building a company on Django in 2020 seems like the equivalent of driving a PT Cruiser and blasting Faith Hill’s “Breathe” on a CD while your friends are listening to The Weeknd in their Teslas. Swimming against this current isn’t easy, and not in a trendy contrarian way.
The four problematic areas Tom mentions, (bundle splitting, SSR, APIs, and data fetching) come out of his experience building really awesome things (e.g., at Mapbox and Observable) so he knows at least a bit about this. To build a “modern” JS application, I find myself having to write considerably more code and configure a multitude of additional libraries to get what I feel I used to get for free with, say, Ruby. And then I’ve still got problems I can’t find good solutions for.
(Related are DHH ‘s thoughts about building for the web he delivered at RailsConf last week.)
Again from Tom’s article, this gem is kind of hidden near the end:
And it’s beneficial for companies to shift computing requirements from their servers to their customers browsers: it’s a real win for reducing their spend on infrastructure.