Can you elaborate as to why your linked article would suggest nextjs to be a "circus"? If anything, DHH (founder of RoR) and his Looney-Tunes opinions are much closer to a circus sideshow than anything I've seen come out of Vercel.
More like 15. By 2016, Rails was supposedly dead and we were all going to be running the same code on the front end and back end in a full stack, MongoDB euphoria.