alt Hacker NewsVercel has slowly taken over Facebook's position as being the employer of the main developers of React. There's a debate to be had over how much they 'control' it or not, but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.
5 or so years ago, Next was a pretty solid option to quickly build up a non SPA, when combined with the static export function. It wasn't ideal, but it worked and came batteries included. Over time it's become more bloated, more complicated, and focused on features that benefit from Vercel's hosting – and static builds can't take advantage of them.
These newer features seem of limited benefit, to me, for even SPAs. Why is there still not a first class way of referencing API routes in the client code that provides typing? Once you reach even medium scale, it becomes a mess of inteprolated string paths and manually added shared response types.
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I'm trying to build a nextjs app and it's quite painful. It seems to be more and more focused on SSR, which I don't care about (looking for a static app that calls separate API endpoints). That would have been fine in the NextJS I remember from a few years ago, where static and SSR seemed equally viable, but I can't be bothered now. I'm going to try Tanstack Start.
> but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.
There is a decent bit of history around that page and whether some things should go in a collapsible div and whether that was prioritizing certain frameworks over other ones.
One thing I'm still salty about is that CRA isn't mentioned anywhere (in the entire site). It's like it never existed.
Exactly, this why if I use next.js I always hijack the api routes and use Elysia, it comes with something called eden that makes the typing e2e fantastic, can't recommend it enough.
As a side note, I'm slowly moving out of Next.js, as you said, is bloated, full of stuff that is just noise and that benefits them (more network requests more money) for little user benefit.
Right now for me the gold standard is Vite + Tanstack Router. (And Elysia for api/server, but thats unrelated).