[scrollaway]

Yeah React is not meant to give you this layer. NextJS indeed does. Why do you care if it becomes unfashionable in the future? Pick one tool that fits your use case and run with it for its lifetime. If you need to learn something else 5 years from now, learn something else. I’ve been in software for two decades almost, I’ve always had to learn new frameworks and libraries, part of the job isn’t it?

[solardev]

It's not that I mind learning new things, it's that React is so barebones everyone tries to make it complete by adding different things. One person likes redux, another mobx, another context... some like class components and others like functions, some use libraries and other use frameworks, etc. Sometimes all in one codebase if it's old enough. It's a lot harder to maintain over time than a more opinionated framework. I wish Angular won out, myself.

[boredtofears]

It's all just javascript at the end of the day. What you're describing is exactly why many people like React.

> It's a lot harder to maintain over time than a more opinionated framework.

That's not true at all, that depends on the quality of the codebase the exact same as if it were built on an opinionated framework. I've seen plenty of bloated Rails codebases that were miserable to maintain.