Has anyone, especially a growth hacker touching both the public facing and the inner chamber of strategy, actually seen SEO executed same or better in an SPA or PWA ( front end rendered HTML at runtime, with headless content pulled via XHR ) versus the more knuckle dragging approach of server based MVC and other SSR ( back end rendered HTML, straight out of the database or flat files ) I really dislike the idea of skewing all of participant experience to the metrics created around the first discovery of how to start fires and cook food rather than eat raw meat, or warm our bodies while we live in damp caves. Great example here is Wordpress. Search Engines now do JavaScript rendered content natively, and do not only scrape the flat files of a landing, but run them. But people still seem conflicted if we can finally build strategy around SPA/PWA SEO. Do we still need to cut off our noses to compatibly pite our faces so search engines can interpret them online, or if it safe to expect front end rendering is effective for business results? Would love examples of successful SEO via SPA/PWA or be told we definitely need to stay prehistoric a while longer.

Google say they can render JS, but it's stil not perfect. The html needs to be DOM for Google to see it and even then it's not always straight forward. That's why the still recommend SSR in their Docs for JS. I've worked on a many JS sites and few SPA/PWA and some kind of SSR solution is usually a must. A site I worked on rebuilt their site as a PWA and it lost 50% of it's organic traffic the day after they rolled it out. They only gained it back when they switched to SSR.

Thank you very much for confirming this suspicion @Max Peters. I really appreciate the detailed answer. And you had to have really been searching to catch this 20 days later!

Yeah I was quickly scrolling through all unread messages to see if there was anything I could help with. Happy it's been useful.

Very helpful, thank you @Max Peters. Out of follow-up curiosity: how does your most successful CMS stack look in light of this? SSR from Headless? Old-stype MVC2? Static files?

As long as the html you want Google to index is sent from the server on initial page load it doesn't matter.