IIRC strfry has a very plugin based architecture, so it's probably still along the same lines of a dumb relay and smart client. It's probably an outlier, just a guy that wants to take advantage of his already existing server with a very efficient DB with events as a way to easily integrate a client facing website. I am very impressed by how quickly it does the server side rendering.

It would be a shame if every client took a similar approach, and now they'll need their own relay, probably pulling in alll events from the network and you can't pick your own relays client side. But I think we'll see all kinds of approaches in nostr. I especially like how he is going about custom algorithms and forking communities to tweak your own.