It's incrediy subjective obviously, but in my 25 years of web dev (full stack) rendering speed has been the number one gripe from users. I've spent thousands of hours optimizing web things. The biggest impact on user perception of speed was the move to Web 2.0 eg JS apps that fetch data with 'ajax' and update the DOM.
If my experience is anything to go by users absolutely prefer client side rendered apps (with SSR, hydration, caching, memoization, optimal data structuring, etc, etc).
No doubt a huge amount of client side JS is garbage, and users would be better served by a server rendered website than a bad client side rendered app, but they'd be even better off still with a good client side rendered site.
I often use a mix, with ASP.NET Core MVC doing most of the work, but using Javascript to load some things at the client-side - for example, table data.
This provides fast page loads, with the ability to load additional data without reloading the whole page.
It's incrediy subjective obviously, but in my 25 years of web dev (full stack) rendering speed has been the number one gripe from users. I've spent thousands of hours optimizing web things. The biggest impact on user perception of speed was the move to Web 2.0 eg JS apps that fetch data with 'ajax' and update the DOM.
If my experience is anything to go by users absolutely prefer client side rendered apps (with SSR, hydration, caching, memoization, optimal data structuring, etc, etc).
No doubt a huge amount of client side JS is garbage, and users would be better served by a server rendered website than a bad client side rendered app, but they'd be even better off still with a good client side rendered site.