[viraptor]

The context here is the "starting with" situation. It's much easier to do that with PHP since you normally don't have to care about versions there - barely anything requires version higher than in LTS. On the other side it doesn't matter what is clearly documented, or which registry is up to date - a person looking at this for the first time is either going to have an easier life or not. Nextjs effectively has extra steps you need to know about and follow.

[wouldbecouldbe]

that's simply not true. nodejs v12 is years old, its like using php5 and lots of platforms don't support 5 anymore.

[viraptor]

Security support for node 12 ended in 2022. For php5, in 2018. Those are very different.

Rhel 7 is still alive, supports node 8, maybe 12, but nothing higher officially.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Yeah that's more an issue with Rhel, but you can solve that easily with NVM https://tecadmin.net/install-nvm-centos-8/