[wereHamster]

Unlikely that Next.js itself caused the bloat. The same could happen with any framework, and just migrating to another one won't fix the underlying problem.

Next.js may switch away from webpack (to swc) at some point in the near future (they recently hired the developer of swc).

[leerob]

More details on SWC transition here: https://nextjs.org/blog/next-11-1. There will be an opt-in flag in 11.2.