My team is trying (something like) this pattern out. Initially I had the sentiment that many commentators here had, “this feels like re-inventing HTML”.<p>After discussing more the benefits, I am in favor of us using the pattern because it means we’re moving a lot of complex logic about deciding which “tiles” to show off of the front end client(s) where it can be hard to maintain. We’re centralizing it one place in the backend and surfacing higher level decisions to hide or show the tile, rather than surfacing lower level data the clients need to crunch and reduce into a decision about a tiles visibility . Since the server is a single place to determine which tile to show, we can do things like quickly disable a feature for whatever reason.<p>We’re cognizant it <i>could</i> become over complicated if we try to do something like reinventing flex box, but I think that using the pattern tactfully is sensible. We’re specifically only doing SDUI to decide which “tiles” to show, not to try to power things like the layout which we are hard coding on the client. I think of it less as SDUI (buzzword) and instead think of it as a helpful way for my teammates to understand “thin client fat API”