I don't know if it's something that people do consciously to reduce costs and just never talk about, or if it's an unintended consequence, but it's here.
It's very deliberate. It's even what is taught in colleges.
I've had debates with recent graduates who believe the proper way to build anything from a web site to an app is to offload as much of it as possible on the client. If the client doesn't have the latest gear? Too bad. They're an "edge case" and shouldn't be allowed to be on the internet. Go curl up in a corner and die, you old and poor people.
The tech world would be an entirely different world if ethics were part of the required curriculum.
I'm genuinely not quite sure what you're talking about. What remotely significant costs are being transferred from the server operators to the client? An SPA without SSR still needs to server a bunch of static data to the client (the JS app bundle). It also needs to look up and return any dynamic data the client app subsequently requests. The only actual computation being moved is the generation of HTML/DOM markup from the server data, and I can't imagine that being a remotely significant amount of computation except in some pathological examples like extremely large pages or extremely intensive computations required for rendering (like, I don't know, maybe some geometry visualization tools or something?)
You don't offload things to the client in order to save money. You offload things when it will improve performance. Most of the processing power and bandwidth will still be incurred by the server, just at a different time in the lifecycle of the app.
If your page takes 3 seconds to show anything at all, your bounce rate will be stupid high.
If your page loads nearly instantaneously with placeholders, and then the content loads in over the span of 4 seconds. Your bounce rate will be significantly better.
Even though your page loads slower, it will be perceived as faster resulting in less users navigating away before your page starts rendering.
Perceived performance is only one factor but there are many other reasons why you offload things to the client.
It's very deliberate. It's even what is taught in colleges.
I've had debates with recent graduates who believe the proper way to build anything from a web site to an app is to offload as much of it as possible on the client. If the client doesn't have the latest gear? Too bad. They're an "edge case" and shouldn't be allowed to be on the internet. Go curl up in a corner and die, you old and poor people.
The tech world would be an entirely different world if ethics were part of the required curriculum.