Comment by bigbuppo

The whole reason we need web "applications" when a simple web site will do all boils down to the demands of marketing and advertising. If you were to go to a major news organization's web site, the bulk of the javascript isn't for frontend UI frameworks, but advertising. Go to a video streaming platform, and they do Weird Things not to prevent scraping, but to inject marketing analytics for advertisers even when you're on an ad-free plan.

Marketing and advertising makes the world a worse place. When you look at the real numbers, it rarely achieves whatever business goals it's supposed to achieve, though for some reason they keep throwing money at the crap because maybe this time it will be different.