I want to tell you that React Server Components completely changed how I think about building web applications, but I want to be more honest than that. What they actually did is make me rethink some assumptions I'd been carrying for years without questioning — which is more interesting, if less dramatic. The mental model shift is real but it's specific. For most of the React era, the default was: render on the client, fetch on the client, manage state on the client. Server-side rendering existed, but it was often an optimization bolted on rather than a native way of thinking about components. Server Components flip this. The default, in a properly set up Next.js 13+ App Router project, is that components render on the server unless you explicitly opt into client-side rendering. That's a genuinely different starting point. What does this mean practically?…