It does not suck. The compile times are OK and are getting better. Angular (and other) SPAs have capabilities no RoR, ASP.NET or Django setup can even begin to touch. Separating the back-end from the front-end with an independent API is also a god-send.
Death to remaining in the dark ages for nostalgia's sake.
Oh, it does suck, hugely. Longer time to first paint, more bandwidth, more cpu and battery usage, huge dependency chains, slow "live" updates...
A lot of my issue with the Javascript-heavy present of "modern" SPA websites is that they have to recreate native browser functionality, which is inevitably slower and worse.
Way too many websites could have the same functionality, in a simpler form, with better performance with a more "traditional" stack. You can even have your API separated front-end and back-end via server-side rendering (by which I mean old-style server-side rendering).
The modern zeitgeist is mostly hype, fad, and novelty.
> The compile times are OK and are getting better.
Our frontend Angular test runs take 25 minutes to run less than 2,000 unit (not integration) tests. That's just nonsense. I don't blame Angular so much as I blame the JS ecosystem. For comparison our backend unit test runs (ASP.NET Core) take 3 minutes to run 6,000 tests.
You can argue we're doing something wrong, but as a company with a a thousand or so devs - reaching out to the most experienced frontend devs we have, their answer is: you've got too many tests, split up your SPA into smaller SPAs. Great, more complexity and dependency management hell.
Death to remaining in the dark ages for nostalgia's sake.