I'd add that the OP was advocating for static HTML which is, in this day, unsellable to a lot of clients. I love producing static HTML server-side and in house a lot of our internal tools get written like that and operate fine.
Additionally I feel like there was an implication that in such a setup the client would be doing hard processing - i.e. aggregating a raw data set on the fly - I've seen this done and it's terrible in most circumstances and it certainly isn't the norm. The server can do the heavy lifting and then hand things off to the client to do all the minor display adjustments like localization, adjusting for timezones - display stuff.
A well written front-end can provide a far more responsive page by using over-fold only rendering that the server is mostly ignorant of. Both sides of the product should be independent systems setup to treat the other as foreign I/O pipe where data is just being requested and returned.
Additionally I feel like there was an implication that in such a setup the client would be doing hard processing - i.e. aggregating a raw data set on the fly - I've seen this done and it's terrible in most circumstances and it certainly isn't the norm. The server can do the heavy lifting and then hand things off to the client to do all the minor display adjustments like localization, adjusting for timezones - display stuff.
A well written front-end can provide a far more responsive page by using over-fold only rendering that the server is mostly ignorant of. Both sides of the product should be independent systems setup to treat the other as foreign I/O pipe where data is just being requested and returned.