Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

my whole attitude towards a website changes if it feels like an SPA. Subconsciously, I know that I have to baby it…The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

This is so true.

As a user, I’m always much happier when presented with a form that is entirely on one page, or has a “hard” submit button for each step that takes me to a new page, as opposed to a “seamless” form that exists as a blob of JS state. The former has relatively predictable submit, autocomplete, and back button behavior, while the latter varies widely by implementation.

As a user, I always feel more at ease in a classic web form for bureaucratic data collection.

Lastly, here’s the kicker: your team can’t out-engineer the browser.

The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript. To beat that, you need to be continuously investing significant engineering effort into cutting-edge application work.

sticking with the web primitives rewards developers over time.