I certainly agree. There are almost always ways to avoid "loading a good bit of data on the user's first use". But for your traditional SPA, it's quite common that you need to make a few AJAX calls to your backend API in order to fetch some data to show to the user. This was built for mostly that case, not for the "let's block the user's screen for 5+ seconds while we do unnecessary data fetches" case.
Edit: I misspoke when I said "a good bit of data" in my original response. I simply meant any API calls to your backend.
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I certainly agree. There are almost always ways to avoid "loading a good bit of data on the user's first use". But for your traditional SPA, it's quite common that you need to make a few AJAX calls to your backend API in order to fetch some data to show to the user. This was built for mostly that case, not for the "let's block the user's screen for 5+ seconds while we do unnecessary data fetches" case.
Edit: I misspoke when I said "a good bit of data" in my original response. I simply meant any API calls to your backend.