React is so far from "simple" it's not funny, then to throw nextjs in there too...
For instance, I find vuejs to be way simpler as a non-frontend dev, and that's way overkill for what I'm interpreting the OP to want.
For instance, I find vuejs to be way simpler as a non-frontend dev, and that's way overkill for what I'm interpreting the OP to want.
Is react/next complex? Sure. Everything is far more complex than it initially seems, HTML is complex, React is even more complex if for no other reason than it builds on top of HTML.
But websites are also complex. I've found that I can very quickly reach a website complexity where I feel more productive in React than bare HTML; very quickly indeed. And next is really, mostly, just nothing on top of that; its dev tooling, yeah you sometimes have to think about where the state is (server/client) and where the rendering is happen (if you use next export: its just always on the client, done). Experientially, these are small problems; and would potentially be intractable for a website that has attained the complexity to need to solve them, built on bare HTML.
There are a few new techs that I want to try, to see if they can capture the simplicity of HTML, with the good parts of react. Vue is definitely one, but I've been following Astro for a bit and it also seems interesting; granting the ability to just go basic HTML, or bridge into React, Svelte, anything.
It is a very powerful tool for sure, but it is so misused in places where it is not needed.