I remember when the point of an SPA was to not have all these elaborate conversations with the server. Just "here's the whole app, now only ask me for raw data."
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Then they rediscovered PHP, Rails, Java EE/Spring, ASP.NET, and reboted SPAs into fullstack frameworks.
I can understand the dislike for Next but this is such a poor comparison. If any of those frameworks at any point did half the things React + Next-like frameworks accomplished and the apps/experiences we got since then, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Now they accomplished this by imposing a lot of constraints on what you could do, but honestly it was solid UX at the time so it was fine.
Like the things you could do were just sane things to do in the first place, thus it felt quite ok as a dev.
React apps, _especially_ ones hosted on Next.js rarely feel as snappy, and that is with the benefit of 15 years of engineering and a few order of magnitude perf improvement to most of the tech pieces of the stack.
It’s just wild to me that we had faster web apps, with better organizarion, better dev ex, faster to build and easier to maintain.
The only “wins” I can see for a nextjs project is flexibility, animation (though this is also debatable), and maybe deployment cost, but again I’m comparing to deploying rails 15 years ago, things have improved there as well I’m sure.
I know react can accomplish _a ton_ more on the front end but few projects actually need that power.