As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

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I fail to see how one could get excited about Next.js, young or old. It makes so many poor design decisions for the type of tool it presents itself as. It is my understanding that the original intent of the project differed, so I can understand that the design choices may have been sensible in that context, but are a terrible fit for the change in project scope and, indeed, how people are trying to use it today.

I'm old. I still get excited about technology that is worth getting excited about. But Next.js brings nothing to the table.

At least in part, I don't have the time or energy to care anymore. In my 20s I loved reading long form articles on AnandTech about the latest chip or motherboard. Nowadays when the kids are in bed at 9:30 or later and I finally have a moment of downtime, I just want to watch a tv show with my wife and go to sleep.

I still think new hardware is neat but I don't have the mental bandwidth to follow it closely and in depth at this stage.

What makes new technology exciting, whether it's a web framework, a phone, a car, or the internet, is all the things people can do with it that were impossible, or just very expensive, before.

In many parts of tech, we've had quite the run where there were leaps and bounds from one year to the next. Innovation curves slow down though: New phones used to really be substantially better than the year before, but now the new capabilities are mostly irrelevant for most people. Even something like OS updates used to bring in relevant changes, but not so much nowadays. Web frameworks, as the OP looked at, have not been doing anything remotely revolutionary in a long time. So anyone that is focused on just one corner of tech, and only looks there, is bound to start not caring about new tech. It really is not getting better.

To remain enthusiastic, one needs to keep looking in different places, and see improvements in new areas, or jumps in places that were stagnant. AI was relatively boring in the 90s, not so much today. Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes.

So yes, it makes perfect sense to pay a lot less attention to web frameworks right now. But if what you want is relevant novelty that is likely to change how things are done, the solution is to look elsewhere, instead of getting depressed about how modern UI tech is stagnant.