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by phpisatrash 965 days ago
That's said, I totally agree with the author.

The fact is that Next.js is becoming complicated. It's not simple anymore. Now you have to use a app folder with "page.js" to make it as a route. It's not file system routing anymore. It's folder router.

Besides that, app folder is slower than pages.

The amount of complexity to build a simple react app is overwhelming. You need to know the conventions created by a so called convention free framework.

I've been building nextjs apps for 1+ years, but for the next one I will be looking for an alternative, maybe Remix, Redwood, I don't know.

Vercel became Apple. They really like to make great presentations, and events, to their releases, but, instead of increasing the developer experience, they are decreasing it. The only good thing about vercel, as said by the author, is the Next.js deploy, that is really easy to do.

2 comments

> Now you have to use a app folder with "page.js" to make it as a route

Reminds me of the +page.svelte in SvelteKit.

both are bought up by Vercel and becomes Vercel focused, left community behind

  Monopoly is not just
  the name of the game
  Law of antitrust
  lays in a grave
  Pay us, go bust
  In money we trust
  From dawn to dusk
  Use Vercel you must
I dabble in UI and just started a new next project and it really kind of sucks now.

What do you recommend?

This is largely personal opinion as someone who uses Next at work all day. But Svelte/SvelteKit or Astro are my personal goto's/favorites outside of Next. Both are robust enough to handle pretty much anything you throw at them, add a complier to help catch errors before build time, and most importantly have incredible developer experiences.
[Astro](https://astro.build) is a production-ready alternative to Next.js and has been giving me great results.

You can render simple HTML/CSS/JS snippets where required, and go all the way up to Svelte/React/etc TSX components without ceremony when you need more complexity.