Serious question - if it was so much better then, why are approximately zero new companies building a Laravel/Rails/whatever app and using jQuery for the front end? If it's that much of an advantage I would expect at least someone who is trying that (because surely some are) to succeed with their lean, mean tech stack. Why wouldn't you have just written the project in that standard MVC stack instead of a modern one?
You won't get any objection from me on the debugging point, it's much harder, especially when you're crossing environment - e.g. running the front end locally but maybe hitting a remote dev or QA backend. I will point out though that there are logging tools that support the pretty standard practice of having correlation/transaction/trace IDs on your requests, such that you put in a GUID from an error and it shows you the entire request and anything that request spawned.
You won't get any objection from me on the debugging point, it's much harder, especially when you're crossing environment - e.g. running the front end locally but maybe hitting a remote dev or QA backend. I will point out though that there are logging tools that support the pretty standard practice of having correlation/transaction/trace IDs on your requests, such that you put in a GUID from an error and it shows you the entire request and anything that request spawned.