I think that "I'm a backend person" says it all -- most of the people in this thread are probably not JS natives or front-end natives. All of the complaints about JS fatigue, or not knowing how to use client-side routing are because you've done things differently on the backend. Is it such a surprise that front-end frameworks and tools make more sense to people who actually enjoy and have experience working on the frontend?

If you provide an API schema, with a SPA the whole frontend can be developed separately of ever touching backend code. Okay, so you changed the name of model.thing to model.anotherThing - quick change in the reducer that is consuming that end point and call it a day.