They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).

I really want this to be true. nextjs is a nightmare. I'm eternally disgruntled.

nextjs is also powerful due to AI. But the value is a robust interactive front-end, easily iterated, with maybe SSR backing, nothing specific to nextjs (it's routing semantics + React).

So much complexity has gone into SSR. I hate 5MB client runtime just to read text as much as anyone, but not if the tradeoff is isomorphic env with magic file first-line incantations.

> To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

I guess they should have put some of that marketing money into hiring someone to manage the security of their systems. It's pretty telling that they had to hire an "incident response provider" just to figure out what happened and clean up after the hack. If you treat security like something you don't have to worry about until after you've been hacked you're probably going to get hacked.

So glad I decided to just stick with django/htmx on my project a few years ago. I invested a little time into nextjs and came to the conclusion that this can't be the way.

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