My take is, that a performant backend gets you so much runway, that you can reduce a lot of complexity in the frontend. And yes, sometimes that means to have globally distributed databases.
But the industry is going the other way. Building frontends that try to hide slow backends and while doing that handling so much state (and visual fluff), that they get fatter and slower every day.
This is an absolutely bonkers tradeoff to me. Globally distributed databases are either 1. a very complex infrastructure problem (especially if you need multiple writable databases), or 2. lock you into a vendor's proprietary solution (like Cloudflare D1).
All to avoid writing a bit of JavaScript.