I have coded in Laravel for 4 years now, and I have implemented various different JavaScript frameworks into my stack. The time however has come to move more toward PWA's etc.
My question is, should you completely separate datahandling and only communicate via API calls? Like if you have an eCommerce site, everything from getting the products, search results, product index, cart management etc. Via API calls, instead of the traditional return of views and including the data on the return ie:
view('my.view', ['data' => $data]);
Whether API or regular, you still have back and forth trips of data. And API's vary on usage. If only a mobile app I'd go with some sort of API. But for a normal website that's also mobile friendly I'd go with regular laravel usage.
Just make sure you have mobile friendly media queries, and images optimized for mobile. But that's not hard to do.
Separate front and backend completely
That is how it is already. The frontend once delivered is just static nothing sitting on a browser waiting for a click or something, that's when the movement of data takes place again.
it depends on what you want (future as well) if you want to build an app in the future then api is the way to go- but if you want to separate the backend from frontend then API is still the way to go.
I think APIs make sense, create a separation of concerns, you can also then use ajax calls..
