One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion here, but I hate this website's UX. Replying to a comment loads a new page, losing the entire context of the thread. There is no UI to indicate if there's a reply to an earlier comment made. The typograph is ugly as sin, and hard to read (too small on desktop, looks bad on mobile, poor contrast). With new pages needed for basic reply/editing capabilities, the site doesn't even accurately track the navigation stack. Sure it loads quickly, but we can load a hello world in a p tag pretty quickly too. HN as a site is a perfect example of how bad a SSR experience can be.

Don't know who built this site or how old it is, but the UX is definitely sub-par compared to many other server-rendered sites. Submitting a form and losing the scroll position doesn't happen in every site, even if the page gets reloaded. And the font thing is more of a CSS problem than a SSR/client-rendering problem.

A lot of it could be improved with some CSS changes (scaling etc) as a sprinking of javascript which could handle commenting without reloads. My opinion is that it's perfect for what it is, a discussion board and nothing more. It's not a social media site.