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by harrisi 1178 days ago
I could believe it, I just think it's hard to sell that to some people, as it's not very specific. The pitch just isn't that compelling, as things like "fast", "just works", etc. aren't very useful. I'm not against things like Next, and I do think they're useful, but this branch of discussion was about the pitch. The homepage lists "Client and Server Rendering", "Nested Layouts", "Data Fetching", "API Routes", "Middleware", and "CSS Support" (and a few others) in a list of features that "make the web. Faster." Other than middleware, I would sure hope all of those things would be supported by a web tool since they've all been features of web browsers and servers for decades.

The point is that it's not clear what exactly Next does, let alone why it does those things. In my mind, Next (and friends) just helps smooth the edges of all aspects of modern web development. That's just not a very specific statement. Also, a lot of those edges aren't so sharp for a lot of use cases since modern browsers and servers offer the same functionality. I still think Next and friends are useful because the edges may not be as sharp, but there are quite a lot of them.