> In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need.
This true to most software projects that are used more than one set of people. Joe Armstrong proposed a solution that we should opensource functions only and people could assemble everything else using these opensource functions. I start to think that he might be right and instead using "frameworks" we should use these set of functions instead.
Spot on. This is the core problem.
The ammount of functionality is not the problem.
The problem is that the functionality is not a set of composable functions and classes. It's an inversion of control "framworky" blackbox, where behavior is hard to reason about.
I did find it quite funny that he makes this claim, but then writes an entire blog piece about how nextjs is no good because of one particular thing it doesn't do to his liking!
The Unix philosophy?
Every DOM element is a file. And you can use ioctl from JavaScript for anything that doesn't fit neatly into a one dimensional stream of bytes.
How I feel any time I see a simple static website or someone's developer portfolio with a vercel URL. Like, did you really need this?