Server-side rendered Javascript apps

While learning about the origins of Node (getting out from beneath my rock), stumbled across this article by Tom Dale, which I found informative and well-written. Here’s a quote:

For me, who always had a relatively modern device, this stuff was super fast. But Dan explained that they had users all around the world clicking on links to Twitter, some of them in internet cafes in remote areas running PCs from 1998. They were seeing times of over 10 seconds just to download, evaluate, and run the JavaScript before the user saw anything.

I really appreciated the nuance this article brought. The real world is complicated, and this article reflected that.