My opinion as a web dev who started in the 90s is that you have to follow the history a little bit to know how we got here: - Serverside rendering (like Rails or PHP) isn't great for clientside interactivity - The other clientside interactivity frameworks (ActiveX, Flash, Java applets, VBScript, Shockwave, VRML, etc.) all died. (HTMX and Hotwire etc. didn't come until much later) - So we're stuck with Javascript + XM…
That was very thoughtfully written. Thanks for explaining the history and the tradeoff in such details. I really appreciate it.
I encourage anyone starting a new web app to compare & contrast different frameworks, building a tiny prototype in each, to see which devex and user experience they like the best. That can include Next, yes, but also all the other ones mentioned (HTMX, Svelte, Vue, Vite, Astro, Remix). Even pure serverside ones can still have their place, for some use cases. I think our industry is differentiated enough these days that there's no one-size-fits-all framework anymore; they each have their strengths & weaknesses.