In practice, the SPA is so slow and the user's device is so much slower than the datacenter that the "something" you see is a useless splash screen, and the actual content takes longer to arrive than just doing it SSR.
Reddit is probably the most familiar example of this, because it actually has multiple implementations (old.reddit, i.reddit etc) that let you see the difference!
I am wary of gleaning anything on the matter from Reddit. Their engineering decisions don't fit either the convention nor the needs of most web applications.
As for whether the initial paint is of value, that comes down to product and implementation. Nothing is faster than offline-first or local cache, which SSR does not have a good narraative for.
Reddit is probably the most familiar example of this, because it actually has multiple implementations (old.reddit, i.reddit etc) that let you see the difference!