Using SPAs where they're not necessary like for a purely content-based website. See the "new" Reddit, Twitter, etc.

I think that for a lot of people, SPA + API is just the default, even though most of the time you can get away with a traditional MVC.

Even then MVC is almost always far more than needed to get the job done well... as are most frameworks.

I have noticed in the big corporate space many people writing this code are formally educated to write code in a very specific way that isn't quite JS-friendly and they need the extra boilerplate to make JS behave.

I see some of my colleagues (mostly front-end devs) don’t even know how to write code that’s not SPA + API, it’s pretty sad. It over complicates every project, and like you said, MVC in most cases is enough.