The same game plan every. single. time. Get into the JS developers' zeitgeist, wrap an existing cloud service with a new frontend, sell it at a markup.
Bonus points if the services can sell for each other.
React has RSC because Vercel wanted to fight Shopify. NextAuth was practically bought out by Clerk to serve as sales funnel. <img> tags are marked as "not good" by a leading React framework because the hosting provider behind it wants you to pay them for image optimization.
What Rauch is doing is the developer equivalent of private equity squeezing, and what's insane is how well it's working.
No one is saying they're not useful at all, the problem is Vercel (or really Rauch's entire cartel of companies) strong arm different technologies and topics to fit a narrative that's disproportionately in favor of "use our thing".
RSCs are not amazing if you're not Vercel and don't have access to their closed build format (especially after they killed the serverless output format)
I use image optimizers, I'm not about to go around telling people that img tags are bad.
> Finally, there are lots of alternatives to what you're stating, no one forces you to use NextJS over, say, Remix or Vite with SSR.
Remix had to reject RSCs to start because as one might expect, having one (1) design partner doesn't make for the most fully baked proposition.
Also the "there's other choices" refrain ignores the fact that no one is developing in a vacuum. Vercel is pumping enough money into the ecosystem that the mindshare is shifting towards Next regardless of technical merit. So it's not enough to say "who cares if Vercel distorts what Next is, just use something else"
As I've worked in PE companies, I know all too well how they operate. It's just a shame that developers are naive and clueless about it.
Dan Abramov (react core team) already said that the React team wanted to do RSC, Vercel were the followers that were eager to integrate and productionize what the React team wanted to do.
NextAuth is a competitor to Clerk auth. How is it bought out? Because Vercel pays an OSS developer to further develop NextAuth, and Guillermo also invested in Clerk? Someone using NextAuth means they're not using Clerk.
The implication is that you can't do anything that relies on node APIs that edge doesn't support which can be quite limiting.
There's rumour that they're walking back this decision, but it always struck me as an arbitrary way to "encourage" codebases to make themselves compatible with edge which in turn would make deploying using Vercel easier.
(In general I'm reasonably happy using NextJS, though there are many architectural decisions that I find frustrating)
One problem I saw with Vercel, and a reason why I steered people away, was that they were very slow to react to some of the challenges of serverless workflows, like building their own in-house services to reduce latency or allowing different kinds of serverless tiers for longer-lived workers. You could hit growing pains almost instantly.