Something I noticed a long time ago is that Vercel turns everything they touch into being 10 times harder than it needs to be.

I have come to conclude it is that way because they focus on optimizing for a demo case that presents well to non-technical stakeholders. Doing one particular thing that looks good at a glance gets the buy-in, and then those who bought in never have to deal with the consequences of the decision once it is time to build something other than the demo.