The Design Systems team has drafted the SSR proposal (T272878), but we have also discussed rolling in other capabilities into the front-end modernization initiative (e.g., build step T199004 T279108, JS runtime T328699) and don't yet have a consolidated team-wide perspective of the problems we are trying to solve or how the potential solution(s) weave together.

Timebox: 1 week (~March 1)

Acceptance criteria:
As part of the proposal, we also want to answer the following questions around the "why?" and "what?" of the initiative, but also explore potential approaches to the "how?":

• What exactly are the problems we’re trying to solve by driving this initiative?
  • That is, are we trying to solve: multiple ways to write UI? Better developer experience? Converging FE development within MediaWiki with where the rest of the industry is going? Improving performance?
  • Potential problems we might include here:
    • It is hard to use Vue in certain development contexts on wiki
    • We need to provide a solution for users who have explicitly disabled javascript
    • It is hard to integrate Vue into our development toolchain
    • It is hard to integrate Vue-based development workflows into our existing server-vended UI paradigms
    • We cannot use typescript
    • Our bundle size is large and getting larger
    • We cannot currently use ES6 syntax
    • Our build chain is PHP based
• Why do we think our team should be tackling these problems, and why now?
• Who do we need to help us?
• Do we believe there is one solution path to address these problems? Or are multiple solutions needed?