We are running code on servers and clients, communicating between the two (crossing the network boundary), while our code often runs on millions of distributed hostile clients that we don't control.
It's inherently complex, and inherently hostile.
From my view, RSC's are the first solution to acknowledge these complexities and redesign the paradigms closer to first principles. That comes with a tougher mental model, because the problem-space is inherently complex. Every prior or parallel solution attempts to paper over that complexity with an over-simplified abstraction.
HTMX (and rails, php, etc.) leans too heavily on the server, client-only-libraries give you no accessibility to the server, and traditional JS SSR frameworks attempt to treat the server as just another client. Astro works because it drives you towards building largely static sites (leaning on build-time and server-side routing aggressively).
RSCs balance most of these incentives, gives you the power to access each of them at build-time and at run-time (at the page level or even the component level!). It makes each environment fully powerful (server, client, and both). And manages to solve streaming (suspense and complex serialization) and diffing (navigating client-side and maintaining state or UI).
But people would rather lean on lazy tropes as if they only exist to sell server-cycles or to further frontend complexity. No! They're just the first solution to accept that complexity and give developers the power to wield them. Long-term, I think people will come to learn their mental model and understand why they exist. As some react core team members have said, this is kind of the way we should have always built websites-once you return to first principles, you end up with something that looks similar to RSCs[0]. I think others will solve these problems with simpler mental models in the future, but it's a damn good start and doesn't deserve the vitriol it gets.
