I’ve been meaning to respond to this for a while; it’s just I’m a master procrastinator.
At the end of the day, I’m keeping the default Discourse behavior because everything else is just too much to maintain.
I’m pretty confident that during my experiments with this, the JS version was better received by Google. The impressions seemed to always jump when it got the better version.
John Mueller of Google search responded to our tweets about this, here is the initial tweet.
I still think some sort of solution done by the open source community would be majorly beneficial. Perhaps server-side rendering.
I understand this would be a major thing for Discourse to take on, but imagine the jump in traffic to all the Discourse forums out there if Google got the nicer UI/layout, etc.
John of Google says it should be fine though, so that should be factored in.