I started developing websites in the mid-90’s, and shipped my first commercial one in '99. I didn’t really have JavaScript (As we know it today) - it was a fancy client-side ‘make-funky-things-happen’ enabler, not a ‘make-the-whole-page-work’ enabler. I’ve always looked at frameworks as something that’s useful to solve specific problems - Google Mail couldn’t be made without a framework. A web forum? It might help. A regular website? Doesn’t need it.
You don’t need an SPA to render any of the marketing, sales or other websites. Most webshops don’t need an SPA, just some light basket handling and data rendering and caching. But say that to any modern web dev, and you’re looked at as though you’ve got three heads, while they ship a page that’s multiple megabytes of JS to layout some text and prettify some pictures.
It’s pseudo-realtime; things happen on a tick, but that tick is pretty generous in timings and you can pause the game at any point.