No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there. Being ideologically against any and every form of JavaScript is being pretentious and holier-than-thou.

As for concrete examples of the above, see lobste.rs for an excellent interface that's still minimal and responsive. Typing this comment on HN took me to a separate HTML page for absolutely no reason; Lobsters doesn't do that and allows you to write inline, preserving the context above.

Old Reddit (the only acceptable way to use Reddit) is another example of good JavaScript. Fuck the new redesign, but there are countless subtle and useful features in the old design that are only possible because of a tasteful use of JavaScript.

> No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there.

But that's not modern web development, that's jQuery-style coding. Modern web development is about heavyweight SPA frameworks like React or Angular.

Heavy weight SPA frameworks might be popular, but there are also tiny SPA frameworks like choo, svelte, hyper.

I like Svelte, but it's not exactly tiny. And it still has the cost of generating everything with JS.