[antisol]

You are not the only one thinking this. A couple of years ago I was working with some people who were using next.js.

For some feature they wanted, they explained to me how nextjs has this great "feature", which was "really exciting" and allowed all kinds of fancy stuff that I've been doing since about 2003. They were going to turn on next's server-side rendering.

My immediate reaction was to point out "congratulations, you've just reinvented PHP, only with a much much worse language and two extra servers".

A lot of these "solutions" use three servers, not the two you mention: you use one server you don't have any control over, e.g google static hosting, to host the "compiled" static stuff - then you have that point at a server running node and another copy of all your terrible javascript, and then finally a third server running some more sensible stack, which could easily and more cleanly do the job of the other two using tech that isn't trash.

It's called "progress", and people like you and me just need to get with the times, it seems.