I don't hate NextJS or anything, but I've never met a JS backend that I loved a whole lot compared to a conventional Rails one. They always turn out to be missing little details and trying to fill them in always like round hole square peg misalignment that just never quite ends.

I’ve worked two summers on a Next.js app and Rails for a side project that I’ve spent 300 hours on. I would choose Rails if the interactivity could be made only with forms. Rails is simpler, opinionated, but a lot less powerful. But I was making a whiteboard which is super interactive I’d choose next.js. The con with Next.js is it’s just more complicated, some of my coworkers often shot themselves in the foot by not putting code inside useEffect

I outline two in the article:

1. One-person software project

2. Complex enterprise app with lots of tables, like a vendor management system.

I mean, any scenario? I'm not trying to be snarky but server-side Javascript has always been a weird code smell from first premise. Now, when to use RoR vs a lighter-weight framework like Sinatra is a more interesting question, but it's about what you need out of the box.

Almost all scenarios