I would like to give more context here so that you can make a good decision for your case.
First we made the decision not to have a JS framework on the client and to drop this idea as a whole. For our case it was just adding complexity and one more framework. This does not happen overnight, but it could happen. So we decide that there is no JS and the whole platform should work in the case of JS disabled on the browser (this bootstrap navigation menus are a pain in the a…). It should be a progressive web application (PWA).
After this decisions we did not replace JSON with Ajax calls. We skipped most of them entirely. Some JSON requests could not be skipped, but we changed them as AJAX - for example “generating a username”. When users register they could choose a username, but to make it easier for them we generate one by default. When generating we must make sure it is a username that does not exists in the DB. For this we need to make a request to the server and this is one place we are using Stimulus to submit the username.
A place that we still use JSON is with Datatables- it is just so convenient. There are also a few progress bars that are making some legacy JSON requests.
Overall we have Ajax here and there, an a few JSON requests, but that’s it. Like 90-95% of the workflow is working with JS disabled.
We even took this to the extreme. We are testing it with browsers with JS and browsers without JS. So a delete button on a browser without JS is not opening a confirmation. But with JS enabled the delete opens a confirmation. I was afraid this will introduce a lot of logic in the specs, but I am still surprised it did not. We have one method “js_agnostic_delete” with an if statement that check if JS is enabled and decides what to do.
My point is that moving JSON to Ajax 1:1 was not for us. It would not pay off as we would basically be doing the same, but in another format. What really payed off and allowed us to reduce the code base with like 30-40%, increase the speed and make the specs not so fragile was to say - “let’s deliver our platform to a JS disabled browser, and if it has JS, than great.”
To give you even more context this was a set of decisions we made in April 2020 after years of getting tired with JS on client. We are also quite experience with JS as we’ve build a pretty large framework for 3D that is running entirely in browser so it was not like a lack of knowledge and experience with JS on our side that brought us to these decisions. I think whole team grew up enough to finally do without JS.