Some of those views are delightfully terrible, no surprise; but I did think the Google homepage and the HN new-comment form turned out satisfyingly clean.
There's absolutely no reason to use Vercel. I've always run Next on our own servers, for multiple clients and some very complex projects. Page Router or App Router.
Ironically I choose to deploy our nextjs projects on Vercel because interacting with our inhouse stack means involving an infrastructure person who wants to critique and research how you’re developing your app. With Vercel I can just deploy a project and don’t have to ask Steve what the best set of server tools I need and then work with Steve on the monolith of Kubernetes configs to get it deployed. And while I like Steve, adding him to a project is a huge time sink and cost center all it’s own. Even if I get platform access to self serve, Steve will be there gating me for every little permission I need.
I hope you at least let devs deploy on whatever stack instantly with new projects and services with something selfserve-y like (Vercel/Heroku/etc).
I used to feel the same way, but at a certain level of Node.js experience I came to prefer the backend JavaScript idiom. It's much lighter and more pragmatic, and gives the knowledgeable engineer a lot of flexibility. So stick with it.
Don't preemptively give up on React with Next.js because some posters turn their frustration with it into contempt. Many of us use React 19 and Next App Router to great effect, and enjoy it, although there was certainly a learning curve.
NextJS app router/server components is incredible. By focusing on server-component-compatible patterns for interactivity, my rather complex web app retains like 90% of its functionality even with client side js disabled. I think the hate it gets really might be a skill issue.
It’s not about frustration, unwillingness to learn, or dismissing the tool altogether. My point is about trust. I just can’t imagine a Next.js app being as easily maintainable 10 years down the road as a Rails one. Honestly, I can’t even picture upgrading to a new major version without breaking something, because the pace of changes is just too fast. Sure, it’s great for small, simple projects. But building a business on it and risking breakages or dropped support? Not for me.
This isn't accurate. Most Next shops continue to use Page Router with no problems. We have an internal tool that uses both Page Router with React 13 and App Router with React 19, all seamlessly supported OOB, including frontend composition. So, again, I have to assume most of the FUD is rooted in inexperience.
And yet for the most part, philosophy and the humanities' seminal development took place within about a generation, viz., Plato and Aristotle.
> Computation has overwhelming dependence on the performance of its physical substrate [...].
Computation theory does not.