I convinced myself to hate App Router before even trying it because of all the negative sentiment on HN.

After using it in three production-scale projects now, I think it's a great isomorphic JS / TS framework. It's as close to a "batteries included" (such as Rails or Phoenix) system that the JS ecosystem has.

And yet, people generally like to shit on Next.js I sense because they haven't taken the small amount of time investment required to actually just understand it: which I fear is especially true if they came from Pages Router. This kind of fallacy appears to hold true in the OP -- bemoaning that you "can't have multiple middlewares or chain them either"... yes, you can? Sure, it's different from the Express way of doing things, but you absolutely can get it to do what you want.

Was Express ever _that_ easy before you actually understood it and knew what you were doing?