Most of these SPAs you speak about have loading spinners, grayed-out placeholders, all sorts of tricks to make it feel like you're in control while the fetch() roundtrip to populate the page data completes. The borders of your screen may not change, but the page filling with elements after a delay can be just as jarring.

If a non-SPA page loads near instantaneously because the client-side rendering isn't bloated, it can feel just as good as an SPA with spinners.

You can also use tools like turbolinks the author recommended, to turn your non-SPA into an SPA.