For decades, web architecture has followed a familiar and frankly exhausting pattern. A dominant approach emerges, gains near-universal adoption, reveals its cracks under real-world scale, and is eventually replaced by a new “best practice” that promises to fix everything the last one broke.
We saw it in the early 2000s, when server-rendered, monolithic applications were the default. We saw it again in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the industry pushed aggressively toward rich client-side applications. And we saw it most clearly during the rise of single-page applications, which promised desktop-like interactivity in the browser but often delivered something else entirely: multi-megabyte JavaScript bundles, blank loading screens, and years of SEO workarounds just to make pages discoverable.
Today, server-side rendering is once again in vogue. Are teams turning back to the server because client-side architectures have hit a wall? Not exactly.
