What an absolute bunch of nonsense.

If that’s were your performance problems come from, you are either a junior developer yourself or using some PHP-quality framework written by juniors.

Why couldn’t they extend the server-side API to serve the content they wanted? The post opens with the words

When we architected an e-commerce platform for one of our clients

It implies they have control of the full stack, and yet they’re not making use of this advantage.

I know they said its not an article of best practice, but holy shit they had to add an additional layer in there to optimize anything…

Not to be a stick in the mud, but treating a URL like a “sentence” will always be better in the long run. Unless you already have a flat structure, in which case carry on.

You can even add a caching layer later on if you find you need to scale your DB, but at that point its still going to be loads better than any “UX”. Shit, you could even toss a redirect specific to your landing page, or just a rewrite at the routing layer. Sure, you lose the ease of adding them, but maybe it shouldn’t be so easy.

/rant