Next.js is the most used React meta-framework in the world and one of the most resented. The numbers say both things at once. The State of JavaScript 2025 survey puts its usage leadership beyond argument while noting, in the same breath, that satisfaction has slipped, and it names the culprits: the rising complexity of Server Components and the App Router. Spend any time near the discourse and you'll hear all of it. The framework is bloated. The App Router broke my mental model. RSC shipped half-baked. The whole thing is a funnel into Vercel's hosting. Some of that is fair, and I'll get to the parts that are. A lot of it is people who picked the wrong tool, or used the right one against its grain, and then blamed the tool.
I've built on Next.js for years, including platforms where the wrong decision would have cost real money and real users. So this is my two cents, offered as one practitioner's view rather than a verdict. I don't think Next.js is the best framework available. I think it's the most reliable bet, and those are not the same claim. Understanding the difference is the whole point.
Everyone has an opinion about Next.js, and most of them are about the wrong thing. Here's mine, for what it's worth: the framework is rarely the problem. How you choose it, and what you do to it afterwards, almost always is.
