In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. And the ones that do are probably better off building a bespoke solution from lower level parts.
Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.
That is my opinion as well. Things like SSR are forced onto users with a very smooth onboarding, but I'm concerned that in practical terms this perceived smoothness can only persist if the likes of us pay the likes of Vercel for hosting our work.
In some degree I feel the whole React ecosystem might have ended up being captured by a corporation. Hopefully it wasn't. Let's see.
Open up vercel, point it at my repo, and environment variable, it starts building and… build error. I search up the strange error log on the next issues page, and find a single issue from 3 years ago with one upvote and no response or resolution.
So I threw it on a VPS and just built it with whatever the “prod build” command is, and it totally worked fine.
So in my limited anecdotal experience, hosting it on vercel won’t save you either lol
I'm sure commercial incentives would lead issues that affect paying (hosted) customers to have better resolutions than those self-hosting, but that's not enough to explain this level of pain, especially not in issues that would affect paying customers just as much.
After a week of futzing with it I just threw up my hands and said 'no can do'. I couldn't untangle the spaghetti JS and piles of libraries. 'Compiling' would complete and if you looked at the output it was clearly missing tons of bits but never threw an error. Just tons of weirdness from the toolchain to the deployment platform.
I don't know much about the nextjs and whether it was open like sveltekit currently is.
To me, nextjs (I think) was always meant to favour vercel but sveltekit has a rich history of managing multiple adapters.
Now, that being said there are still some chances of a rugpull that might happen but if that ever happens, I am staying on the last sveltekit that worked with cf and other cloud providers.
What's the story here? I assume this group was chosen for a reason and didn't meet expectations.
They paid them on the strength of seeing it working, but then the consulting group basically ghosted when the customer asked to adjust it to run on cheaper hosting (probably because they couldn't), then the site got shut off because the hosting was all in the consulting groups name and they stopped paying it. Digital Ocean nuked the database for non-payment and they lost tons and tons of manual work putting in data.
If they had brought me in before hand I could have saved them a lot of work by asking the hard questions and reigning in the tech overspend.
That capture happened... two years ago? (Perhaps there's a good blog post there, if it doesn't exist already)
https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app
It throws you straight at Next.js
Objectively that sadness does not change reality however. At least within my own professional network no-one seems comfortable starting a new project using React today. Almost 100% of the paid front end work I've been involved with myself or discussed with others recently is now using alternatives - most often Vue though I've seen other choices at least seriously considered. I've even had a couple of recruiters I haven't worked with for years suddenly reappear desperately looking for someone to take on React work and openly admit it's because they are struggling to find anyone good who wants to go near it. All of this is a sharp contrast with the market of the early 2020s when React was clearly the preferred front end choice. And all of this is surely a direct response to the push to make React a full stack framework, the added complexity that has introduced, and the apparent capture of official React development by Vercel.
Rich and Simon are incredibly important, but they're in it for Svelte and the community more so than a paycheck from Vercel. Tee has been doing most of the maintenance on SvelteKit currently funded by community donations. And this isn't counting other infrastructure like vite-plugin-svelte or the Svelte CLI which are entirely maintained by volunteers. I don't think Vercel funds a majority of the work on Svelte even if it might be close to it.
I actually wrote exactly that blog post and did a conf talk on it earlier this year. I covered why the React team switched to directing users to use "frameworks" to build React apps, the development influences behind React Server Components, why the React docs didn't list tools like Vite as viable options until just a couple months ago, and various other related topics:
- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/react-community-20...
- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/presentations-reac...