1. Rendered content, if there is enough of it, will be more content to send across wire than a cached bundle.
2. Cached bundles are cached. Network doesnt matter when its cached
3. Even bottom of the barrel motorolas are not wimpy nowadays
4. The obvious reasons why I dont want my aws box to do rendering is because it will need to everyone's rendering, and how big "everyone" is in not constant. It's another moving part in a complex system that can break. Also because I have to pay for the box.
5. Fast networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous
6. The performance gains are for a static site, which won't necessarily be representative of typical saas. How do you measure the risk and cost of my site breaking because my date rendering server got overloaded?
> Even bottom of the barrel motorolas are not wimpy nowadays
They are: https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
That said, RSCs and the rest of the "let's render a static site but let's also send a multimegabyte bundle for 'hydration'" is still wrong
I am going to base my opinion on using the bottom of the barrel Motorola that I own rather than reading that novel
"I'd rather base my opinion on my own personal anecdote than based on stats". My "they are" was referring not to your specific Motorola, but to the "bottom barrel". Which, while improving, still doesn't even remotely justify the bundle sizes or "fat networks".
--- start quote ---
The median mobile page is now 2.6 MiB, blowing past the size of DOOM (2.48 MiB) in April [2025]. The 75th percentile site is now larger than two copies of DOOM. P90+ sites are more than 4.5x larger, and sizes at each point have doubled over the past decade.
...
Compared with early 2024's estimates, we're seeing budget growth of 600+KiB for three seconds, and a full megabyte of extra headroom at five seconds
--- end quote ---
Translation: for P75 (aka for 75% of users) to get a site load in three seconds you need to ship at most 600KB of Javascript
Ask any ux specialist, observing base reality (observe someone using x) gives a better impression of usability than any statistics will
Is serialising a model and building JSON that much more expensive than rendering HTML?
It is less expensive?