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Next.js is infuriating

(blog.meca.sh)
1033 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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solatic ◴[02 Sep 25 08:42 UTC] No.45100515[source]▶
Half these issues stem from a relative misunderstanding of exactly where the code is running. Next.js has layers upon layers upon layers due to the interplay between the browser, middleware, edge vs. node, SSR... It's an enormous amount of complexity and it really only fits under the following set of circumstances:

  * You sell a B2C product to a potentially global audience, so edge semantics actually help with latency issues
  * You're willing to pay Vercel a high premium for them to host
  * You have no need for background task processing (Vercel directs you to marketplace/partner services), so your architecture never pushes you to host on another provider.
Otherwise, just tread the well-trod path and stick to either a react-vite SPA or something like Rails doing ordinary SSR.
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9dev ◴[02 Sep 25 12:00 UTC] No.45101939[source]▶
Vercel is the cancer of the modern web. The claw into every framework ecosystem and abuse them as sales funnels for their paid plans, pretending they care about open source, competition, and the web.
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oompydoompy74 ◴[02 Sep 25 12:55 UTC] No.45102505[source]▶
Vercel funds and sponsors many open source projects that would otherwise be struggling for funding. Their framework is tailored to the platform they build because that’s a good experience. I don’t currently use them, but people get funneled to their paid plans because it’s a good developer experience. I acknowledge that they are a capitalist enterprise with their own motives, but I think cancer of the modern web is a little strong.
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1. specialp ◴[02 Sep 25 16:23 UTC] No.45105192{3}[source]▶
People get funneled to their paid plans out of necessity. While NextJS is open source, the back-end to run it is not. That is where all the complexity lies. Even on Netlify, you run into crazy issues with things like their image stack. It does all this "Optimization" and caching that make it completely impossible to reason about and you run into implementation problems from the providers. Sure you can just run it in a container but then you are taking on all the complexity of NextJS preoptimizations without getting any of them.

Serverless framework attempted to make this stack to run yourself for Next but it is buggy due to the complexity of Next. Open source includes being able to run it. Releasing the framework and funding OSS that also enhances NextJS is nice, but it is a trap because if it comes time to seriously run it, your only option is vercel.