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- fragile under load and very difficult to debug SSR issues

- inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code

- horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases

- crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas

- schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai

- multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework

- "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps

- major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations

- general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem

Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting.

I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.



Yeah matches my experience. It’s just so much complexity just to get SSR. I’ve worked at places that used it for b2b SaaS apps with no public web part, so the SSR is just a big liability… whyyyyy


I use it for my web site where SSR is critical for SEO. For app development I don’t use Nextjs. I think it is designed for web sites (as opposed to web apps) and it is great for this purpose


yep this is how i use it and it has worked out really great...sometimes i wonder what people try to do that they have all these issues


Reminds me of VC backed framework Meteor that was attempting to do full stack JS and collapsed under its own tech debt.


I think Meteor is finally starting to fully overcome the tech debt from the second half of the last decade. They're in a recent Node.js release, and the next version will integrate a modern bundler (Rspack) in its tooling.

Lots of apps are still stuck in Meteor 2.x hell because of the dependency on Fibers though.


I'd honestly love to use something that delivered on Meteor's goals. Next.js ain't it though lol.


I was pretty involved in their stack back in the day, it was a good alternative to Django at the time for simple plug and play admin apps, and to this day i think they had the simplest OAuth setup of any framework I've used.

The real issues were the super tight coupling with MongoDB and their decision to roll their own package ecosystem instead of just using npm from day one.


Not to mention their braindead decision to aggressively cache everything as much as possible, which they're now trying to undo, but still haven't shipped.


Try Astro my friend. React SSR with none of that next bs


Used Astro for a pro bono project. Found it fantastic, well documented, provides solutions for the hard parts, gets out of the way for the easy parts. Documentation is well written, but I find I don't need it much because mostly it works how I would expect.


Astro is not tied to React. You can choose your framework.


You lost me at React SSR. That is part of the complexity bs. React is a lib for mapping state to the DOM. There's no DOM on the server. So React on the server is 95% useless for that purpose and hence, overengineered to create a bit of HTML and send it down the wire.

I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.


You can render html with astro without react. Plain old html templates with options


how do you manage the application state with Hono? I saw their home page and it didn't mention anything about it.


Hono is a server-side framework like Express. So same way like you handle application state in most server-side multi-page web apps: You just fetch whatever you need from the DB per request.

"State management" really isn't that much of an issue on the server. Only on clients, when you need to map state changes to DOM updates.


This is the vercelization of react peeking through, that people even associate react with ssr is an anti-pattern.


I've heard good things, what would you say is the killer reasons to justify being the nodejs ecosystem vs something more purpose built for ssr like php?


As easy as php for simple stuff. And can do complex SPA stuff.


I've been building loads of stuff with it for years and never experienced any of this. Sounds like a YOU problem.


multiple other comments sharing my experience and expanding on it.


If its so crappy how's it so popular?


The core React documentation explicitly points you to nextjs and says "this is how you should build react apps."


I mean, that's good enough for me.


They spend a lot of money on marketing.




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