You should know this before choosing Next.js

I've been building SPA apps for years with express and React. For a recent project we decided to use Next.js and self host. The biggest benefits have been 1) having the middleware contained in the same runtime and therefore not having to set up multiple projects and hosting for each. We just build a single docker image and put it in ECS. 2) having things like routing, bundling, linting, etc. already included. There are some downsides--like I would rather have biome out of the box than prettier/eslint, but most the developers haven't really cared.

There is a lot of magic and complexity under the covers that I haven't fully groked, and from that perspective I have reservations about it, especially after the recent CVE. As an example of the complexity, I had to set up Sentry, and while Sentry does have a package specifically for next.js, it was still tricky to ensure we were capturing errors with appropriate context in every possible spot.

It's possible as our project matures we'll hit some roadblocks that will make us question our decision to use next.js and self host, but overall our dev team has been productive with it.

There are many Astro recommendations. I like it as well but only for more content heavy websites. If you dont have that it's not as easy to work with as something like Remix in my experience.

If you wonder if you should justify your body text the answer usually is no, especially on the web.

As an architect who helps choose stack items, this article and thread screams very loudly not to use next.js.

Scrutinizing an oss maintainer is one of the first tasks I check off when researching tech stacks.

Even the slightest ethical concerns would exclude something from my decision making.

next/image is a particularly poorly built piece of NextJS in my opinion.

At least the last time I used it (around a year ago), their was very little support for basic image transforms. Image resizing and cropping, for example, would always ignore the height provided and resize to the requested width. Any change to aspect ratio was done via a div wrapper and CSS, the image itself wasn't actually cropped to the requested aspect ratio.

This complaint is less about Next as many image services do it, but I've never liked the idea of an image service returning an image format other than what was requested. Deciding what image file size and format to request is a browser concern, the back end should just serve up what was requested rather than trying to cleverly decide the "best" format based on request headers.