Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)
All three of my kids were riding full bikes around 3 years old, having used a balance bike for 12-18 months previous. I don’t think my kids are exceptional - balance bikes work wonders!
Disclaimer: I was one of the founders of the business, but left a long time ago. It’s still a great service! We print a newspaper for our friends and family each year.
I don’t believe it’s ever been accessible for free. It’s just that ownership has moved from the state to a private company and now it’s difficult to make it open.
I know Dave personally, and I can assure you he’s read Seeing Like a State! In fact, if you spend more than 30 seconds in his presence he’ll probably give you a copy.
Our experience of moving from Heroku to CrunchyBridge has been very similar - excellent help with the migration including jumping on a call with us during the switchover to resolve a broken index.
Would strongly recommend them to anyone looking to move off Heroku.
I refer to Fly.io’s guide to Safe Migrations in Ecto (Elixir’s DB adapter) multiple times a week. It’s a very useful quick reference to check whether you can get away with a basic migration or if something more involved is required.
By using client side rendering you’re effectively playing SEO on hard mode. It’s all possible, but you’re making life very difficult for yourself.
Google will crawl and render client side only sites, but the crawl budget will be reduced.
The bigger factor is that Google cares a lot about long clicks - clicks on results which don’t immediately produce another search or a return to the results page. Client side rendered sites almost always perform worse from the POV of the user and therefore convert at a lower rate.
And now Web Vitals includes things like Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint, you’re going to find it much harder to bring these metrics under the target thresholds.
If you want to perform well in search, make things easy for yourself: use mostly SSR HTML and CSS and some sprinkles of JS on top.
Chromium is open source and both Google and Microsoft do whatever they want to it as part of developing their browsers. WebKit on iOS is a closed source blob of rendering engine and assorted bits that it is not possible to deeply extend or alter.