Elder developer here too, correctly making my SPAs has made my work significantly more efficient and maintainable now that my back end is basically a rest api and my front end requires very little network interaction after the initial load, which has been made pretty minimal.

Elder developer too, you can easily render react server side and statically. Once you remove state, react simply becomes pure functions that output jsx nodes, it's also dead fucking simple, but gives the the possibility to add hydration and state later if you need it.

I prefer just writing my html, js, css, as is, and then transpiling to pack it down, treeshake, hash, cache bust, CSP, etc etc.

The amount if headache, overhead, inversion of control, mess, and bloat involved in frameworks tends to make me spend way too much time on writing boilerplate.

template and slot exist now, and modern js can do most of the shit fancy libs used to.

There's very little need for frameworks unless you meed a SUPER dynamic website that has tonnes of mutability.

The amount if times i see people load in like 3 frameworks and 10mb of bullshit and ten js files to make a fucking static form that doesn't even do anything fancy is insane.

Just fucking write the like... 8 lines of normal code to populate the form, wtf? Why are we using routers at all, HTTP already exists and does that, why did we re-invent http?

Front-end devs need to spend less time installing npm packages to try and magically solve their issues and just learn how to actually write code, SMH.

More Server side logic means more vulnerabilities on your end.