Been working with React for the past 9 years and I hate what Vercel's influence has done to it. I hate what they've done to Next as well, but at least that one is theirs.
I’m glad I noticed this early and stopped using Next on time. For me the thing that made me realize this was their “hiding” (for as much as they can) and making it more difficult than intended of the call home metrics system in next. They refuse to add a setting to turn that off, and instead want you to set an env variable or run a npm command.
Just think about they do this and refuse to add a setting.
That’s how you know who you’re dealing with.