Are SPA architectures are an industry-wide mistake?

There is a distinction between an app and a site. An application has many partial state updates. Two updates is uncommon for an app. Way different for a website where people ideally land on the right page from a search engine. There is a place for an SPA but it's not everything.

We tend to stick with an SPA even for things which are mainly reads because we're more efficient in a single tech stack. Sadly we don't have big tech budgets to do everything. In theory the JS SPA backend can simply run in the backend if there's no need for an SPA. I had thought hydration and caching to have gotten way better by now but there's still a good way to go.

Just answering the title without looking deeper. Yes, absolutely. SPA has it's place but almost every site that exists would be better off using old school server side frameworks. And instead of realizing the mistake the industry has doubled down and made these insane SSR SPA frameworks that are the worst of all worlds

my opinion is that the browser in general for rich front ends is the mistake, but i know i’m the minority

No. Turning things into SPAs that should have been simple websites has been. Also developing SPAs in JS.

@rimu most decisions humanity makes are mistakes, why only call out SPA architectures?