&quot;people[developers] still often go for Approach A[full ui blocking modal spinners] since it seems easier to build&quot;<p>The small features in this article aren&#x27;t that hard to build.  Most importantly they communicate empathy to the user (like an occasional glance from the staff at a restaurant that knows you have been waiting too long). It also builds a company culture that latency is a meaningful pain point. Too often the server-side team is separated from this pain since they use a local dev server with no load.