To me, Remix seemed like a very lightweight reimagining of what Next excelled at (server side react with nice frontend integration). It was exciting to see how quickly it handled dynamic renders when running from a Cloudflare worker. But now that Next 13 has layouts/server components, I prefer Next.js' approach due to all the other performance work they've done with images, fonts, css, etc.

One thing about Remix that always confused me was the very close ties to react router. It seemed like a distinct and unrelated concept to me, and the continued association seemed like a distraction from Remix's potential to be a stronger competitor to NextJS in the long run

Remix has some very clear second system advantages that become more apparent with usage. Next.js is trying to address many of their relative shortcomings in the 13 release. I would still advocate strongly for anyone to give Remix a try. Both are fine frameworks, at the end of the day.

I share your feeling, but I don’t think it’s reasonable.

I’ve used both now and it’s just fine as a framework. Maybe it’s in the way they present themselves.