Some frontend guy said this best. It was something along the lines of:
"JS frameworks went real hard in client side rendering and branding server-side rendering old and archaic. But that they hit performance issues and began re-adopting server side features and trying to make it look cool again after shitting on it for a decade."
I’ve got nothing against SSR, never have, but CSR or even better SSR+CSR side steps a metric shit ton of issues. I’ve written untold lines of code to render something out in PHP then needed to add jQuery logic to the frontend for UX/UI reasons and then I’ve had to duplicate UI generation in JS/jQuery to match what PHP spits back (think: add a new row to an interface after an Ajax call finishes). It’s hell, you have to keep the two in sync and it’s a bug minefield.
Compare that to CSR where all the DOM is generated though a single codepath. Now take CSR to the next level with SSR+CSR and you’ve got a winning combo. Fast initial render and SEO gains (if you even need that) and only 1 DOM generation pathway.
People want to sound all smug “Oh, back to SSR are we?”, “Uh yeah, we had to CSR first to get to SSR+CSR which is VASTLY superior to SSR alone”.
Tech is circular in that way. See also mainframes, to personal computers, to cloud or any other similar cycle.