I mean eve frontier is a pretty huge fork from almost scratch, did they backport changes into normal eve?

I can't say I have a definitive answer, but there is a blog post from 2025 that seems to suggest they haven't yet: https://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2025/05/fanfest-2025-upgradin...

> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

...why did they make a website not html-first?

Game websites are second only to restaurants in average UI complexity. Lots of them do extremely complicated stuff to provide game-realistic framerates to visitors so they can see if it meets their expectations (10fps or so).

I figure this is the nextjs exception? The website would probably be HTML-first (I.e. SSR, would work non-interactively without JS), just that the JS doesn’t fail silently.