This was one of the points that stood out for me in the article too, also because I strongly disagreed with it. There is nothing inherently wonderful about doing everything client-side.
You get a much more limited range of languages and libraries to work with. You get to use overcomplicated build and deployment processes with ever-changing tools. You get to reinvent the wheel if you do want to use things like URI-based routing and browser history in a sensible way. In many cases you are going to need most of the same back-end infrastructure to supply the underlying data anyway.
Also, it's tough to argue the SPA approach is significantly more efficient if it's being compared with a traditional web app built using a server-side framework where switching contexts requests exactly one uncached HTML file, no uncached CSS or JS in many cases, and any specific resources for the new page that you would have had to download anyway.
Of course some web apps are sufficiently interactive that you do need to move more of the code client-side, and beyond a certain point you might find it's then easier to do everything there instead of splitting responsibilities. I'm not saying everything should be done server-side; I'm saying different choices work for different projects and it is unwise to assume that SPA will be a good choice for all new projects.
You get a much more limited range of languages and libraries to work with. You get to use overcomplicated build and deployment processes with ever-changing tools. You get to reinvent the wheel if you do want to use things like URI-based routing and browser history in a sensible way. In many cases you are going to need most of the same back-end infrastructure to supply the underlying data anyway.
Also, it's tough to argue the SPA approach is significantly more efficient if it's being compared with a traditional web app built using a server-side framework where switching contexts requests exactly one uncached HTML file, no uncached CSS or JS in many cases, and any specific resources for the new page that you would have had to download anyway.
Of course some web apps are sufficiently interactive that you do need to move more of the code client-side, and beyond a certain point you might find it's then easier to do everything there instead of splitting responsibilities. I'm not saying everything should be done server-side; I'm saying different choices work for different projects and it is unwise to assume that SPA will be a good choice for all new projects.