No. It’s not the influencers, they are just an irrelevant nuisance. It’s the business plan of Vercel, the venture-Capital backed company.

They hire the core contributors of all major web frameworks to continue development under their roof. Suddenly, ongoing improvement of the web platform is largely dependent on the whims of Vercel investors.

They pretend to cater to all hosting providers equally, but just look at Next, which will always be tailored toward Vercel. When will it happen to Nuxt? Sveltekit? Vercel is in a position to make strategic moves across the entire SSR market now. Regardless of whether they make use of that power, it’s bad enough they wield it at all.

When has this ever been a good idea? When has it produced a good outcome? It never has, and it never will.

If you know much about oss devs, then you know they make little money for buckets of work. Vercel is a path where they can make good money and still do some amount of oss work. I dont agree with the argument that vercel=bad because they hire people.

The fact you use the term ssr market is a key point to how effective vercel’s marketing has been via techfluencers. There isnt a market for ssr in the way you use it, only web hosting.

There is a world of engineering outside js framework relevancy wars. It isnt only vercel pushing the framing btw. Other players are trying to replicate the vercel marketing playbook. Use/hire techfluencers/oss devs to push frameworks/stacks on devs who then push it up the company stack.

Usually it doesnt work for a startup but vercel proved it can.

Enter a million lite framework wrappers around well known tech, like supabase and postgres, upstash and redis, vercel and aws.