It is Vercel's "fault" because it sold Next.JS as a BFF (Backend-for-frontend), a concept that didn't exist but helped them sell lots of hosting for React, something absolutely unexpected to every old school React developer.

I did not know they sold it as that.

I did a search and a lot of people are promoting the concept. Maybe it makes sense if you have a strong reason to use micro services, but for the vast majority of systems it seems crazy!