[noelwelsh]

Somewhat an outsider (but I have used Netlify and eleventy). It's basically a tale as old as time: trying to build a sustainable business around open source technology and perhaps fleeting trends in software development.

Vercel and Netlify offer essentially the same thing: easy hosting of mostly static websites + a few bells and whistles. They each support development of frameworks (eleventy, Next.js, Gatsby, and perhaps others) that make their hosting business more compelling to use. Netlify branded it's approach as "Jamstack" which I believe stood for "Javascript and some other Marketing Stuff". Now that the winds of change are blowing, Netlify want to reposition themselves as something a bit different and down play the old stuff and also not make it look like their rivals are doing to well.

[langsoul-com]

One big thing is that Vercel owns Nextjs and has started to do direct integrations with their platform.

Although the features can work without Vercel, it's a second class citizen.

The more popular Next is, the less reason people would choose netlify over nextjs as a default option.

[Rapzid]

Oh and some of the React core team landed at Vercel, and React has been focusing on backend features and partnering with Next/Vercel on early development of said features.

So there is frustration that the React project is now perhaps an extension of Vercel's interests, and focused on helping them sell hosting.

Never ending drama in VC land.

[throwup238]

They also employ Svelte’s creator/maintainer.

[james-revisoai]

What features struggle to work self-hosted?

It was my (perhaps outdated) experience that in fact some elements of JS (like using scraper libraries) would not work on Vercel at the time due to memory of serverless function and other limits. But locally they worked on my dev machine.