None of my projects want to be SPAs

For that latter part, although I must recognize that the tooling has evolved into a quite complex pipeline (which is a cognitive investment, almost a gamble, in itself), I also clearly see the benefits of a set of ideas that have rapidly evolved in the turbocharged settings of the web development ecosystem:

React: the distillation of many programming paradigms (functional, composition over inheritance, etc) for building UI components.

TypeScript: the augmentation of JS with mature and powerful programming constructs.

Material: a visual language for UIs with a strong focus on coherence and being truly cross-platform.

All in all, although I'm well aware of the critiques that can be addressed to the modern webdev environment (the so-called "JS fatigue"), I feel like all these new tools empower me, and I really enjoy learning about them.

People can, and have written bad websites using every technology. I can think of plenty of badly written, hard to use MVC websites from my past.

It should come as no surprise, that bad developers have found ways to make badly written SPAs as well today.

I don't think we should judge a technology by its worst implementations.

With that approach, you really wanted to keep every component self-contained. That meant a lot of bookkeeping with passing events back and forth between parent and child widgets, but while it was a lot of typing, it was all fairly easy, and if I wanted to change how an event was handled, it usually only involved a component and MAYBE the components immediately above or below it in the component tree. Data passed further than that was generally wrapped in objects and therefore didn't require code changes.

Then introduce Redux and similar frameworks, and I totally lost interest. It's as if the entire React community forgot all the lessons they learned writing Python and C programs in college and went back to creating global state. What in the actual hell? I wrote a good amount of code in Redux, too--I worked on teams that used it--so this wasn't just pre-judgment. These frameworks add a huge amount of hidden global complexity just to avoid having to pass parameters to components, which is the simplest thing to do.

And once you're doing that, you HAVE TO write an SPA, because any part of the page you want to be interactive gets pulled into Redux and your JS eventually eats the whole page. It's an infection.

When writing JavaScript now, I sometimes end up rolling my own version of the component style. It's an effective design pattern for UI widgets. But it hasn't been worth it to use React for a while now because the tooling and tutorials are all too conflated with Redux and similarly awful tools. And on a team, there's always the worry that someone on your team will infect your code with Redux and it will grow and consume your entire site. It's a real shame.