You make some good points, particularly when it comes to the reasons why we use APIs. But there’s a sweet spot between code efficiency/performance and abstraction/structure. The former is all about the end product (which is all that really matters in the end right?) and the latter is about developer experience and CI/CD manageability.

I am a recent convert from a nearly 20 year history of PHP and Perl development so I get it. But typescript has won my heart.

Your point about JS/TS not being attractive as a back end language depends on a factor that you can mitigate: using Node.js. Take a look at CloudFlare Workers. 100% V8 and it’s blazing fast.

I also disagree that Vercels motivation for promoting SSR is because they want to bill more usage. I’ve heard this before and it’s a ridiculous premise. They would not throw their flagship product to the wolves to bill more server time that they’re reselling from AWS. Yeah they probably have a good contract with them but I don’t think that’s their goal. I think their business objective is ubiquitous adoption of Nextjs and hence more hosting accounts on their quickly growing platform that offers turnkey deployment and seem less integrations. Plus they keep adding more cool stuff every day like Redis and durable objects.