Next.js is infuriating

I 100% agree. I've ran into the same issues, and I would never use Next.js for anything, and I will encourage every team at work to use something else.

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.

My experience with Next.js are that its rough edges are a feature, not a bug. Everything is geared towards you giving up and just using Vercel's hosting

> My experience with Next.js are that its rough edges are a feature, not a bug. Everything is geared towards you giving up and just using Vercel's hosting

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.

Might have? The official React docs recommend Next.

That capture happened... two years ago? (Perhaps there's a good blog post there, if it doesn't exist already)

Hi! I maintain Redux and am deeply involved in the React community, and have spent a lot of time both critiquing the React team's decisions and explaining their decisions to the community.

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...