Drupal's theming and rendering layer is, historically speaking ... difficult to master. Drupal 8 brought with it a number of tools that make it a glorious provider of JSON APIs and many frontenders have responded by considering throwing out the theme layer altogether for their next project. This approach is not without considerable and often overlooked risks and costs in exchange for that agility on the frontend though.

During this talk we'll cover:

• Reasons why many folks explore this decoupled approach and how often times what results is actually just a "distributed monolith"
• The complexities that this distributed monolith approach brings to not just your development process but also your deployment and maintenance routines.
• The many glorious advantages of sticking with Drupal's theme layer for rendering good old HTML.

There are no prerequisites for this talk aside from being curious about application architectures and being open to having both the exotic as well as the mundane in your toolkit.