But... 99% of insert-startup-product-built-on-React (or honestly, any framework) is typically super slow (for whatever reason that might be). Sluggish, not super responsive, laggy UI, however you want to describe it. A far cry from the snappiness of desktop apps from 25+ years ago.
Something or some collection of people are doing something wrong, somewhere in the chain. So isn't this just yet another way to further entrench the modern state of meh-ness in performant UI?
As someone who has had the misfortune of working on poorly tuned WordPress and Drupal websites in a former life I can confirm this is an issue of culture, not and axiom of whether SPAs are intrinsically faster or slower.
People notice the difference of < 10ms in input delay on a command line. I am pretty sure humans notice stuff >= 10ms, <= 100ms. It is perhaps the expectation, that is different. People do not expect websites to react immediately, like when they are typing a command in a terminal emulator.
> And nowadays you can deploy apps really close to users so latency is really low.
That sounds like blindly throwing money at the software architecture problem you created for yourself. Supposedly SPAs became popular because your line of reasoning was embarrassingly absurd, in the sense that you do not mitigate the penalty of a network call by microoptimizing the cost of a network call.
Proximity is only part of the equation. If a user has a slow router or a busy corporate firewall to go through their timings can be far higher than 100ms even if the server is a few miles away.
