Stop picking one rendering strategy for the whole app

Most teams pick a rendering strategy once at the start of a project and never revisit it. That is backwards. A marketing page, a live dashboard, and an authenticated settings screen need different things from rendering, and treating them the same is how you end up with a slow SSR waterfall on one page or a blank CSR flash on another.

My rule of thumb: if a route needs to be indexed or feel immediate on first load, it gets SSR or static generation. If it is behind auth and mostly interactive, CSR is fine and usually faster to ship. If the expensive part is server-side and the user does not need it all at once, streaming with Suspense lets the shell paint first and the slower content fill in after.

React Server Components change the mix again. They are not a fourth option so much as a way to keep more of the page server-rendered by default while still shipping interactive islands where they make sense. The mistake is treating RSC like an all-or-nothing migration. Start with the obvious boundaries before touching the ambiguous ones.