Of course it is not the whole technology stack, but it is something at least. If your evaluation leads to potential problems, you can create issues right there on the github project!
"Somewhat inherent" isn't meaningful or correct. The fact is that there is a history API and you can use it to implement history for SPAs. Therefore, lack of history is not inherent to SPAs by definition. Intentionality has nothing to do with it.
This is glorious, and made me think; is there a reverse-adblock addon that would “click” on all ads it finds on a page and would load them silently in the background..?
Let’s not put those early phones into the same bracket with more modern ones — the phone market had a very steep improvement in its early years, that has only entered a more stagnating period a few years ago. Before that you pretty much had to buy a new phone each 3 years, now an iphone X is and will be available for many years to come.
That's just scaling difficulty. Android was pretty shit back then too and continued to have performance degredattion due to other reasons like storge implementation unti a few years ago - idk about now.