To me the part that rubs the worst, is that _after_ downloading JS components, listening to events to build a local state, crafting the AJAX request, and rendering the return JSON as HTML, the SPA will then change the URL in the URL bar so that users can (hopefully) bookmark the monstrosity. This is after 75% of the page has been re-rendered anyway. And just to echo your point, there's an entire generation of frontend developers who think this is normal.
It's more like the other way around. Veteran web devs are stockholm-syndromed into thinking the web should always work how it used to work, they tend to think about the web as some sort of sacred internet document. Most devs these days view it as just another medium for apps, and if you look at the web from the app developer point of view, this is completely normal. Is it broken in many ways, absolutely? But not because it's not now the web used to work, as it was also broken/insufficient for modern needs.
There is an entire other discussion about how to keep the web as "information superhighway" (as opposed to an app medium) and accessible. I am sympathetic to that cause, but I think we should create new web standards for that. As it stands, the html/css/js trio is doing too many things and sucks at all of them.
