500ms means a slow connection, high latency or significant bloat.

Optimising the page and using a CDN can help alot.

It is a shame HTML doesn't have rel="swap" in links to "swap" in a new page.

Oh yeah a 15 second spinning circle and 250mb memory is sooooo much better than a 500ms refresh </sarcasm>

A 2s spinning circle may indeed be better than a 500ms flashing reload. Try it on your mom (“waaah why did it flash??”).

I also dislike SPAs but there is business value in this slow spinner that you shouldn’t discount.

Luckily, turbo or htmx solve this just as well. And maybe even more importantly, I can’t think of a modern browser that still flickers.

I don't disagree with you :)

If the layout hasn’t changed, then there is no flicker that I can tell on Chrome/FF at 144hz.