There's a place for spinners, but I agree in the sense that the average user shouldn't be waiting for a spinner in an average session. A green path should be a good experience.

An edge-case user should expect it for expected waits of up to 10 seconds (progress bars for 10sec+ expected waits), because their edge case shouldn't inflict preloading on average users. But ghost loading will make it less annoying in any event, and there should be reasonable timeout error handling.