I don't consider making many network calls necessarily bad for experience. My https://hackerer.news page load makes more requests than I care to count and it runs for 70 seconds (looking at the 'date:'s in the network tab). But the page renders very quickly. It might be bad if you're in AU/NZ idk, but all the requests are cached via CloudFlare and being individual units is highly cacheable which probably offsets a lot of other downsides.
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I don't consider making many network calls necessarily bad for experience. My https://hackerer.news page load makes more requests than I care to count and it runs for 70 seconds (looking at the 'date:'s in the network tab). But the page renders very quickly. It might be bad if you're in AU/NZ idk, but all the requests are cached via CloudFlare and being individual units is highly cacheable which probably offsets a lot of other downsides.