I have to agree that with the introduction of React 18, and the new versions of Next and SSR everything has taken a turn for the worse. I’m sure it’s all very fancy and advanced, but it’s become completely impossible to reason about.
Want to structure your code? There are 4 ways to do it. Want to fetch data? You can use route handlers, server components, or server actions. Don’t forget to choose one of the 5 ways to cache and revalidate data! Want to show a loading indicator while the data loads? There are a few ways to do it, but be careful because some ways depend of parent components being server or client side! Not to mention all of the “unstable” apis.
I appreciate that they want to make it easier to build incredibly efficient applications, but now there are so many options and so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot that I’m stuck with choice paralysis.
IMO a good framework should have one and only one obvious way to accomplish something. More advanced use cases should be hidden away in the reference documentation or left as an exercise. That’s why frameworks like Django and Rails were so successful.
But I’m skeptical they won’t fuck up as well. They have a reputation of breaking everything with react router.