I worked at ZEIT (before it became Vercel) and if they've retained even a 10th of their engineering culture then they're solid, if not a bit "niche" in what and who they target.
It’s funny how frontend has a stigma of less serious engineering when the caliber of programming being done at Vercel is far beyond the level of inadequacy I’ve seen being in big tech FAANG eng departments.
Modern day frontend is ridiculously complex. Back in the day, the only compilers that tried to do code splitting and optimization across network boundaries were ASP.NET WebForms and similar. They were dreadfully simplistic compared to the SSR+ react-streaming-over-the-wire that Vercel is doing. Don't get me wrong, the React compiler written in Rust is leagues ahead of the slow tech in for example the angular world, but it is also magnitudes more complex.
I see this as a side effect of developing economies in the world coming online. When you have to service millions in places with poor network and provide a competitive UX, you don't have the luxury of going with "simple" solutions.
That's what you get for working in a famous company that took over an open source software.
If the destruction of React by Vercel paid your bills and you feel disrespected by my total despise for this get rich fast schema (a la crypto rugpulls), that's a problem for you to solve, not me.
Edit: but in reality I'm happy and thankful to Vercel for imploding React, it helped me to finally check that there are so many better options nowadays.
Dan Abramov, de facto lead for React, said that the React team was driving the vision behind the new features in React. Vercel just said, "how can we help? You guys think server components are great, ok, we'll make them first class as that's where the React ecosystem is headed."
Vercel is doing nothing but trying to improve DX for all the things people complain about React.
I started using Next.js in 2017. It made React a real production framework. Prior to Next.js, React was hard to setup and maintain and hard to make it go fast (on first load). Next.js solved the worst React problems.
I don't think it ruined React at all. I think it helped React gain in popularity - which you might interpret as "destruction".
> Prior to Next.js, React was hard to setup and maintain
No, it wasn't. Now it is an engineering process.
> I started using Next.js in 2017. It made React a real production framework
In 2017 I had React projects in production for years.
> React was hard to setup and maintain and hard to make it go fast (on first load)
And it only got worse and the overengineering to make it looks fast in the first load is not worth it as modern JS frameworks are faster than React out-of-the-box.
> I don't think it ruined React at all. I think it helped React gain in popularity
That's not what stackoverflow's Insights says[0]. Looks like a free fall for me.
That's awesome work. You don't like it for aesthetic reasons, pre-conceptions of aesthetic purity. That's fine too and I think I agree. But it's awesome work.
Go ahead. It is all yours, awesome work is simple work. Vercel wants React to do everything so they can sell everything. Not to me. That was a sad takeover of an open source project tho
I like to joke that because Vercel doesn't make money when you run components in the client, and React is now made for Vercel, that React is now developed for backends.
I'm a big fan of OSS projects being sponsored by companies that use them for a higher level business. Vs a ton of the C# ecosystem where they try to sell you the library/framework.
But hosting businesses ain't it when it comes to frameworks.. It creates weird incentives.