There are good reasons to adopt new software frameworks - they can be easier to reason about and easier to hire for - but it's rare that they bring a pure technical advantage over their predecessors. Many great apps run on Java and jQuery from 10+ years ago and as an engineer you can learn a lot by studying older and bare metal approaches to programming.
That said, web architecture has evolved over the past 10 years and there are significant advantages to the modern stack. Specifically, edge servers can dramatically reduce web latency compared with a traditional server model from years ago (e.g. a single EC2 location) from 600ms+ to reliably under 250ms for dynamic page loads.
Edge computing is not just a frontend design choice - often misunderstood - it is a system of compute (e.g. Cloudflare workers) and cache storage (e.g. Cloudflare KV) that can push your application logic and records within a 250ms round-trip of your users.
For example, the entire dataset which powers aavescan.com is stored and transformed at the edge which makes the loading experience fast despite being a data heavy website with 100s of dynamically generated pages.
Given that edge cache locations are globally distributed there can be a delay in data replication between 5 and 60 seconds. This means that data served by your edge cache could be stale - depending on context.
If you need to guarantee that the initial page load contains data that is fresh (i.e. ~real-time) then edge cache is not the right tool. You need a direct connection to your source of truth, whether that's a single origin server or a small set of globally distributed indexers.
So, you can either block the page load and wait for that origin connection or load from edge cache and stream in updates client side.
George