I've been thinking about this for quite some time. Some backstory.<p>When I first got introduced to web development around 2011 at university, the majority of the course was utilizing Apache Netbeans. What a nightmare that was.<p>What got me excited was the 30 minutes of our last lecture where the teacher talked about client-side rendering using jQuery + external APIs. According to him, it was a fly that will be forgotten in a year or two. For me it was what got me hooked on web development.<p>I then worked at multiple companies doing server-side rendering to get around the problem slow clients. That made a lot of sense back in the day.<p>The move towards static-site generation(SSG) also made a lot of sense and felt like a fresh breath of air after years of slow and uncached wordpress sites taking over the web.<p>But now, 10 years later, I feel like I am seeing the whole industry loop around with the recent move on rendering everything on the edge aka. Edge-Side Rendering(ESR).<p>I get it, faster websites, more money. It is also more inclusive for users with slower devices. But I'd argue that the decentralization of computation by devices own by users is better than moving towards centralization of this computation.<p>So for me, the elephant in the room is how this new revenue stream is being created by cloud providers and how they push us toward SSG and ESR.
Promoting it as a holly grail when SSG and ISG would suffice for the majority of use cases and eventually save everybody a lot of money.<p>What am I missing?