Correct, their main purpose is ecosystem lock-in. Because why return json when you can return html. Why even build a SPA when the old school model of server-side includes and PHP worked just fine? TS with koa and htmx if you must but server-side react components are kind of a waste of time. Give me one example where server side react components are the answer over a fetch and json or just fetching an html page?
The only example that has any traction in my view are web-shops, which claim that time-to-render and time-to-interactivity are critical for customer retention.
Surely there are not so many people building e-commerce sites that server components should have ever become so popular.
The thing is time to render and interactivity is much more reliant on the database queries and the internet connection of the user than anything else. Now instead of a spinner or a progress bar in the toolbar of the browser, now I got skeleton loaders and use half of GB for one tab.
Not to defend the practice, I’ve never partaken, but I think there’s some legit timing arguments that a server renderer can integrate more requests faster thanks to being collocated with services and dbs.
which brings me back to my main point of the web 1.0 architecture. Serving pages from the server-side, where the data lives, and we've come full circle.
