It really is. I am a staunch react defender, I work with it daily and I found the change from class components to hooks to be a better programming model.
But whenever I work with Next, I feel like we lost the plot somewhere. I try a lot of frameworks and I like esoteric programming languages, but somehow Next.js, the frontier JavaScript framework embraced by React is the only experience where half the time, I have no idea what it’s error messages (if I get any to begin with) are trying to tell me. I can’t even count the hours I spent with weird hydration issues.
I'm not a React or Next.js user. Others will disagree, but personally I prefer to minimize my exposure to JS by decorating traditional HTML+CSS documents with vanilla JS as needed.
I was somewhat surprised when I noticed simple Next.js landing pages would break in Firefox. Worse yet, the failure mode was to overlay all of the content with a black screen and white text, "An application client side error has occurred". It was surprising in that a simple landing page couldn't render, but when I discovered that the cause was a JS frontend framework, I felt that it was par for the course.
Perhaps it makes sense to the advocates, but for those of us not on the bandwagon, it can be sincerely baffling.
> Others will disagree, but personally I prefer to minimize my exposure to JS by decorating traditional HTML+CSS documents with vanilla JS as needed.
If you don't mind my asking, what sort of applications have you worked on, how many contributors were there, how long was their lifespan, and how long did you work on them for? Personally, I've found the type of "vanilla" JS approach to be prohibitively difficult to scale. I've nearly exclusively worked on highly interactive SaaS apps. Using a substantial amount of JS to stitch together interactions or apply updates from the server has been unavoidable.
The engineering organizations at companies I've worked at have ranged in size from three devs to over 20,000. Projects I've worked on have ranged from three devs to maybe 500-1,000 (it's sometimes hard for me to keep track at a giant company). I've worked on projects using "vanilla" JS, Knockout, Backbone, Vue, and React[0]. The order in which I listed those technologies is also roughly how quickly the code became hard to maintain.
[0] This is not an exhaustive list of which frontend frameworks/libraries I've used, but it's the ones I have enough experience with to feel comfortable speaking of the long term support of[1]. For example, I used Ember heavily for about a year, but that year was split between two projects I spent six months each on. Similarly, I've used Next.js, but only for prototyping a few times and never deployed with it to anything other than a private server.
[1] Except Lightning Web Components, which I've used a lot but hate so much that I don't want to dishonor those other technologies by listing it alongside them.
Next has enshittifed themselves some time ago. Everything that goes through the VC cycle does that eventually.
I am happy for them and their money, but I can't use this anymore. I take Vite as the default option now, but I would prefer something more lightweight.