"Navigating to a new screen" is such a basic behaviour of the web the idea that we need to rely on a framework to manage this in some way is absolutely insane. At this point the complexity that React imposes on developers is out of all proportion to the benefits that it provides.

Yes there are cases where React is exactly what's needed but when each new version introduces new "best practices" based on how "bullish" Meta's developers feel about a given approach it removes a crucial advantage that helped these libraries become popular i.e. that it's easy to onboard new people on to a project because thewre's a consistent approach across code bases. Right now there's not a consistent approach across 2 or 3 years of React releases and that's before we come to the torrent of metaframeowrks designed to smooth over inconsitencies and deficiencies (state managment! styling!).

I don't know what the answer to this is but having spent a good portion of the last 7 years or so on and off React projects I would advise anyone to think carefully before investing time and /or money in the ecosystem. On balance the benefits aren't worth it the large majority of cases.

note: i've used library and framework carelessly and interchangably here, React has historically been keen to market itself as a library i.e. something you dip into when needed but in practice it bends the whole dev process around it so I feel framework is more apt

Or better yet, just... Navigate to a new (real) web page? Maybe passing some state via URL parameters? At least then the back button has a reasonable chance of working correctly.

It's not hard to get perfect back button behavior with SPAs. You just have to care enough to do it _and_ have written code decent enough that it can be shimmed in.

I believe I was only talking about a single page load.

Instead of a choice between progressively loading in /page-a or waiting for /page-a to fully load before showing it, just direct the user to /page-b instead?