I just want to point out that your argument is now contradictory.

You're stating that networks and latency will only improve, and that this is a reason to prefer SSR.

You're also stating that 50kb feels too heavy.

But at 8kb of SSR'd plaintext, you're ~6 page loads away from breaking even with the 50kb of content that will be cached locally, and you yourself are arguing that the transport for that 50kb is only getting better.

Basically: you're arguing it's not a problem to duplicate all the data for the layout on every page load because networks are good and getting better. But also arguing that the network isn't good enough to load a local-first layout engine once, even at low multiples of your page size.

So which is it?

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Entirely separate of the "rest of the owl" argument, with which I agree.