Agree 100%. Also makes me laugh when people talk about server side rendering. Serving a html page isn’t rendering. The fact that a couple of megabytes of JavaScript ever became responsible for making the simplest of pages even display is possibly the worst technology regression I’ve ever seen.
I think 'rendering' here means something like 'doing what's needed to produce the final HTML for the browser to render'. You can produce the final HTML on the server (server side rendering), or the front-end (e.g., via DOM manipulation), or mix them up (e.g., HTMX replacing parts of the DOM with pre-rendered HTML from the server).
i.e., there's two different steps that each do something that can be called 'rendering': templates to HTML, and HTML to what the user sees in their browser.
I'm inclined to agree with the main sentiment of your post though, and lean myself towards solutions that rely on the server heavily with just a splash of javascript on the front end.
