It doesn't have to be this way. I am not sure when there was a new rule passed in software engineering that said that you shall never use server rendering again and that the client is the only device permitted to render any final views.
With server-side (or just static HTML if possible), there is so much potential to amaze your users with performance. I would argue you could even do something as big as Netflix with pure server-side if you were very careful and methodical about it. Just throwing your hands up and proclaiming "but it wont scale!" is how you wind up in a miasma of client rendering, distributed state, et. al., which is ultimately 10x worse than the original scaling problem you were faced with.
There is a certain performance envelope you will never be able to enter if you have made the unfortunate decision to lean on client resources for storage or compute. Distributed anything is almost always a bad idea if you can avoid it, especially when you involve your users in that picture.
With server-side (or just static HTML if possible), there is so much potential to amaze your users with performance. I would argue you could even do something as big as Netflix with pure server-side if you were very careful and methodical about it. Just throwing your hands up and proclaiming "but it wont scale!" is how you wind up in a miasma of client rendering, distributed state, et. al., which is ultimately 10x worse than the original scaling problem you were faced with.
There is a certain performance envelope you will never be able to enter if you have made the unfortunate decision to lean on client resources for storage or compute. Distributed anything is almost always a bad idea if you can avoid it, especially when you involve your users in that picture.