Oh yikes! What happened? Do you know roughly what version regressed and which chips? (I was tracking Probe-RS as one of the best parts of the ecosystem)
> The problem I had was that the entire experience became really slow when I had it all working together as one "response". Sending back all that HTML for an entire form with some large select lists as well as the response of results became noticeable laggy when there was more than a half dozen results.
Welcome to the disadvantage of server side rendering. We kind of had a point when we decided on delivering a single JS package up front and only tiny changed JSON after.
Using Django back in the 2000s it was easy to get in the hundreds of requests per second unless you were doing truly pathological things in templates or gnarly database queries, and we have far more cores now. Usually something that low either meant things like not caching database connections or complex logic in templates.
Well references in python are mutable by default, so you essentially combine an asynchronous model with mutable shared state. Combine that model with unknown caller exceptions in any subfunction and you're in for a world of hurt.