I can't imagine how slinging ungodly obfuscated JS blobs^w chunks over the wire can ever be the next Rails...

This is beside the point. And I can't imagine how anyone would want to write templates in anything other than JSX and yet here we are.

Rails and friends aren't about a single technical choice, but providing a complete and opinionated framework to build web apps that conceptually fit in to one person's head.

Rails is that. Django is that. Laravel is that. Next is the opposite, where Next-specifica around caching won't fit in to a single head, let alone the app you're building.

How can anything that is completely un-debuggable (like the mentioned chunks) fit in any one person's head?