It was probably the right tradeoff to make between 2007-2017.

Doing anything in HTTP/1 would make you reload your whole page slowly. Then AJAX came along and allowed you to build things that were more interactive and responsive. Gmail was a game-changer.

Since then HTTP/2 came along, and I feel like the industry has blindly continued on the HTTP/1->AJAX trajectory, without stepping back and re-evaluating how much HTTP/2 (and later) can do for us.

It's really not much. We use it to the full with code splitting and preloading, but it's not much. Not bundling is still not possible.