Earlier quoted context omitted.
Server side html rendering will always be less efficient, but I can see the application of using curl to request and parse pages.
You mean more efficient, right? Because the single page "applications" that download UI and data with javascript take a three-digit number of requests and multiple seconds to render everything and be "done".
The traditional page based responses re-send all the html content over again. If the client can cache it then it doesn't have to be, but caching something like a git frontend does not work with page based responses due to the amount of new data.
Just because Facebook and Google abuse js to the nth degree does not mean it's automatically bad. It's how you use it, and you can infact do things without react and Vue.