I was disappointed to find that this post falls into the same pit a number of these defences of the modern web fall into - creating a false dichotomy between "literally no JavaScript whatsoever" and "a framework-authored site with client-side routing". None of the features mentioned in that particular paragraph - user interaction analytics, preloading data and content [on link hover], transitions, avoiding full page loads - need a site to be an SPA, nor are they "fiendishly difficult" to do for the [near-]static sites MacWright discusses in his blog post.
I think it's a shame that frontend web developers have thrown themselves behind the SPA paradigm so hard that the notion of a JavaScript ecosystem that doesn't try to do pull _everything_ into its own domain is unimaginable. I'd love to see more mindshare go towards building libraries that are drop-in/"just add water" progressive enhancements for static sites.
I think it's a shame that frontend web developers have thrown themselves behind the SPA paradigm so hard that the notion of a JavaScript ecosystem that doesn't try to do pull _everything_ into its own domain is unimaginable. I'd love to see more mindshare go towards building libraries that are drop-in/"just add water" progressive enhancements for static sites.
[edit: minor grammar correction]