It's the Vercel way to first run broken previews for several years.

Next started with Turbopack alpha as a Webpack alternative in Next 13 (October 2022) and finally marked Turbopack as stable and default in Next 16 (October 2025). They also ran sketchy benchmarks against Vite back in 2022 [0].

Next's caching has a terrible history [1], it is demonstrably slow [2] (HN discussion [3]), RSCs had glaring security holes [4], the app router continues to confuse and relied on preview tech for years, and hosting Next outside of Vercel requires a special adapter [5].

Choosing Next.js is a liability.

0 - https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussi...

1 - https://nextjs.org/blog/our-journey-with-caching

2 - https://martijnhols.nl/blog/how-much-traffic-can-a-pre-rende...

3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43277148

4 - https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478

5 - https://opennext.js.org/

Got back in to react after a few years’ hiatus and I struggle to even understand what the point of Next is. Bizarrely the official docs even reference Next. Are people using react for non-SPA’s? Why?

They have the enterprise partners that make Next.js the only officially supported SDK on their SaaS integrations.

See Sitecore Cloud, Sanity, Contentful,....

maybe of interest: https://github.com/cloudflare/vinext

(haven't tried it myself)