I guess my overall point here was that you can build a sufficiently interactive webapp without a bloated, client-side, MVC, virtualDOM, JS monstrosity.
Given the fact that most of the bloated JS monstrosities you're talking about are also the most popular websites around (Facebook, Google, Pinterest), I think this assumption might be wrong.
Do you have any examples of popular, complex web apps that work the way you suggest is better? Why is it that Facebook etc don't make things that work the way you're talking about?
I think he means sites that are not as complex as Facebook etc think they need to use the same framework as Facebook etc uses where they would be perfectly fine using the pjax/turbo link style approach the op suggests
Yes, this is what I meant. One prominent example is GitHub. As far as I know they still take pjax/turbolinks to an extreme, in favor of a true client-side template/view framework.
Given the fact that most of the bloated JS monstrosities you're talking about are also the most popular websites around (Facebook, Google, Pinterest), I think this assumption might be wrong.
Do you have any examples of popular, complex web apps that work the way you suggest is better? Why is it that Facebook etc don't make things that work the way you're talking about?