Exactly. I build enterprise web apps for a living and don’t have any of these problems because I don’t have to put ads in them. They are blazing fast and users love the UX through and through. There are myriad reasons why I would never build them with traditional SSR templating.

I could also build a CNN clone in pure React (no SSG or SSR) without the ads and the millions of autoplaying videos that would demolish its current performance.

As for Reddit, perhaps SSR would be a better fit indeed. But most of its problems come from the fact that the SPA implementation is dogshit, and not from the architecture itself... Some things plainly don’t work, for example a feature as basic as the comment tree is broken as hell. This mess would be equally possible with SSR though - I would personally screw up more easily a comment tree implementation with AJAX data fetching in SSR templating and vanilla JS than in React.

I agree that many sites, especially news sites, are disgusting bloated messes. And yes, JavaScript is often involved but it’s not the cause - it is merely an accessory to the fact. The causes are ads, tracking, data mining, even crypto mining (!), and piss-poor implementations (and no, JS frameworks are not conducive to the latter any more than vanilla JS). Each of these causes is in turn motivated by its own root cause, most often economic in nature.