Next.js is infuriating

Your observations apply generally. Debugging "magic" frameworks is often more complex than starting with simple basics and a coherent design. As a bonus there are less dependencies, less build issues and lighter pages or binaries.

> Otherwise, just tread the well-trod path and stick to either a react-vite SPA or something like Rails doing ordinary SSR.

Just write your SPA the grown up way. Write your APIs in a language and framework well suited to such work (pick your poison, Rails, Spring, whatever Microsoft is calling this year's .NET web technology). And write your front-end in Typescript.

There's absolutely no reason to tightly couple your front-end and backend, despite how many Javascript developers learned the word "isomorphic" in 2015.

Recently started developing a client side web app using Angular v 20. The app is quite complex, with about 40 components many of them nested, about 7 to 8 "pages", data dashboards, multiple forms, continuously updating data from server, etc. There substantial amount of data flow in the application.

So far, the experience has been absolutely wonderful, particularly, given the context of myself as a developer in the whole process, which is,

1. I am a seasoned developer, mainly doing python stuff, back-end servers, desktop applications, data applications, etc. Very little exposure to front-end tech.

2. I keep myself updated with the concepts, patterns & architecture of front-end systems, because I am extremely into design and good UI.

3. I am at a stage where I can do basic web apps with Vue, React, Angular & vanilla HTML and JS.

With Angular Signals and concept of Stores, Services and Dependency Injection, I am able to handle data flow very easily, am able to add features to the app in a consistent manner, able to debug and trace errors with relative ease.

I have earlier read NextJS docs, Remix Docs and read tutorials about developing react apps using Vite. It has always been a confusing maze of stuff. Perhaps I am getting old (about to touch 40), but I have been programming for about 25 years now and I was able to carve out the architecture I want in an Angular app with ease.

Also, this app is going to be a production app, and is critical for my work, so its an impactful decision, which, thankfully, I have been happy and pleasantly surprised with.

It could be that I could have chosen React, and end up with the same thing, but, somehow, in the extensive tech stack selection process that I took up before committing to Angular (which involved testing out core mechanisms of the application in React, Vue & Angular), I felt very much at home with Angular way of things.

I have a monstrosity of a Vue 3 project at work and I far prefer it to any "elegant" React codebase I've ever had the displeasure of working with. Boggles the mind that React still has any mindshare to me, Vue and Svelte are both superior to it in pretty much every way except for availability of component libraries (which isn't so relevant in my line of work), and a slight edge in terms of TypeScript support (mostly a problem with Vue's props).

Next.js is indeed not very open for feedback. Next.js is also opinionated. So if you are using Next.js, you can use what they have and do it their way. If there is something, just wait...

For me, it isn't a framework I want to use in any production environment. Your system is too much depending on something you have no influence on. Like in your own code, it is good to decouple, don't make things depend too much on something, not in your own code, but also on external code like frameworks and libraries.

That is why I prefer to build things like I can (kind of) easy drop my dependencies, for what reason, and use something else, or build it in my own codebase. If some framework doesn't allow it, and you have to work it their way, and is the base of everything, that should be a big red flag.