Meanwhile essentially every major tech property develops SPAs and users enjoy them far more than traditional hypertext web round-trip-every-change pages
Big tech companies love wasting money and developing a SPA is a good way to do that.
Whether users prefers SPAs or not is debatable. Amazon, Github, and Aliexpress aren't SPAs because poor usability will cause users to move to competitors. If Hacker news turned into a SPA, I guarantee that it would suck big time.
SPA developers seem to be living in a tiny bubble oblivious of simple solutions to simple problems.
In what world is this not an SPA? I don't see page transitions hardly anywhere, except when you're switching from marketing material to repos maybe.
Additionally, the fact that GitLab (which is devops/issue tracking/wiki/etc.) ISN'T an SPA drives me crazy every day. I have to wait for so many rerenders that could just be seamless loads, it's actually insane to me how unoptimized of a user experience it is, especially when my happy path is super clear with respect to what content I load.
> SPA developers seem to be living in a tiny bubble oblivious of simple solutions to simple problems
I think it's hilarious who you consider to be living in a bubble, and what simplicity really means. Client side interactions need to be smooth. Web applications are consistently and increasingly presenting meaningful user workflows that can be made more resilient and responsive with SPAs. I develop tools for dataflow/workflow editing, scheduling, visualization, etc., and the idea that these things can be made to feel good without a dedicated client layer is truly an archaic attitude.
You seem to be mistaken about what SPAs are. Github is simply a traditional Rails app that uses Javascript to enhance client side interaction.
A ton of web apps provide data visualization features without being SPAs by simply using libraries like D3.
I don't know what kind of apps you're building but claiming that everyone needs to start using SPAs instead of traditional progressive enhancement with Javascript is not right.
Meanwhile essentially every major tech property develops SPAs and users enjoy them far more than traditional hypertext web round-trip-every-change pages