This is probably very tinfoil-haty, but I can't help but wonder how much of this recommendation is a perverse incentive to sell edge compute on Vercel's platform. In general I am very wary of VC-funded open source, like Next.js.
- react being the most popular FE library for time to come
- gain the user's mindshare as react being now a Vercel product (something which is becoming increasingly true)
- users attracted by react and next eventually becoming Vercel customers.
They have also tried or employed several other major library authors in order to position themselves uniquely at the crossroads of major FE software and thus be uniquely positioned to transform those users again in Vercel customers.
I don't judge any of this negatively or positively but that's the case I see.
I remember they got Sebastian :-) Who else?
- at least 2 (top #2) works at Vercel
- at least 4 works at Facebook
Edit: but this is just commits for facebook/react, reality might look differently :)
Whom React got from InfernoJS
In philosophy, the first thing to understand a philosopher's thinking (make a model of his mind) is to read his work but the second is to read who are his influencers.
No field is truly neutral or deeply agnostic (except reality itself which is The Great Equalizer).
In the rest of the world, SEO is the main use case, e.g. Company X (some kind of retailer) has invested in an SPA (when what they needed was an enriched MPA) and then found they were loosing their search engine rankings. Either they:
1. Render that in a headless browser, cache the results, and serve that to crawlers (non-optimal as detecting bots is hard); or 2. Rewrite their new website to be properly architected (at cost); or 3. Buy into server rendering to serve both normal visitors and crawlers.
I worked at a company that had _exactly_ this journey. Don't forget the non-functional requirements when designing solutions, kids.
The best such codebase I can think of might still have been better off overall as an enriched MPA, but given how few normal pages it had compared to the app-ish bits - thereby making staying on a single technology stack a bigger advantage - I'm not quite willing to say it -definitely- would've been better as an enriched MPA. Not quite ;)