SEO has caused de-innovation...why? cause we wasted time building web apps to serve the robots, and the crawlers, and "the google", and bing? ;-/ && the hackers...
SEO has killed innovation...why? if it weren't for paths and routes, single page pure javascript applications would rule, we wouldn't have to build in routing logic into our web applications to handle goofy outdated things like URL paths and we could load things on the fly into the DOM just based on click & touch events, swapping out divs to display our content.
Example ::
** Pure JavaScript Single Page Application **
SEO has created overhead....why? cause developers got lazy when they needed to do all this extra handling for routes to serve the crawlers and the deep link marketers (although the marketers are not to blame cause we could of still passed args to single page apps via #?params), so they chose bloated frameworks to handle all this and introduced bloated unnecessary extra layers and packages on top of more packages which made room for the giants to take over even more...
SEO fueled greed which gave more power to the powerful...why? cause the giants like google & facebook then tried to solve these problems and gave us angularjs, amp and reactjs, more js junk to learn and try to standardize code organization there way, theming, templating their way, and most critical route handling their way so that each of their own respective crawlers and back end data intel gathering bots can read and understand your application because you are delivering your information organized perfectly as the robot is expecting....
Search Engine Optimization was invented to take your money, one way or the other...
...and with these bloated frameworks comes security risk which is inherited from all the packages and libraries injected into your code base no matter if you rely on the functionality of the lib or not...
...and of course don't get me started on all the crooks that where born calling themselves "SEO specialists"...
...which leads me to my conclusion...
my $0.18 recommendation, is;
The year is 2019, Pure JavaScript, HTML5, & CSS3 has come a VERY long way!
... be bold, go back to basics...
...before inheriting a big companies junk, always question the hidden agenda.
AND to get you started, i have created a minimalist example of a Serverless Pure Javascript Single Page Application witch uses the new Ajax Fetch method, pure CSS3 animations & loaders, Bootstrap theming with mobile responsive UI and navigation...read more here.
G-D Bless,
jacob