Yes their DX is technically “over complicating basic things to extract money from chump developers” but it lets users just write code and automate away everything else with couple of click.

It limiting your options can be a good thing, people can just ship instead of being stuck in analysis paralysis forever.

I also found it quite nice entry point for newbie developers. I’ve been donating my time to help out new developers, and learning deployment (it isn’t ”basic” for complete newbies) on top of everything can be daunting. Vercel lets them deploy for free and effortlessly so that they can show off what they’ve learned.

That being said, I personally wouldn’t touch Vercel for any serious work either.