It rocks how Vercel has spent so much time and money on marketing Next.js that my product manager tried to tell me last year that I had to use it. In his mind we wouldn't be able to build our app correctly (an SPA that barely a couple hundred people use) or find developers since everyone uses and knows Next.js.

truly hate how hard these guys have made my job by making react popular.

React server components and server side rendering should never have been in react but instead should have lived its life as a separate project.

I also had similar issues and wrote a guide on how to use LogLayer + pino to get server-side logs working properly.

https://loglayer.dev/example-integrations/nextjs.html

Overall, the logging experience in Next.js is terrible, and not being able to chain middleware, even more so.

Middleware abstractions are challenging because third party libraries tend to abuse it and that can cause performance issues. Also, Vercel has optimized the middleware for its cloud business which includes various optimizations.

I don't see this as a major problem, since there are so many ways to work around it if you really don't like the tradeoffs.

I've found that as long as I don't try to use Next.js for fullstack applications I was ok. It is remarkably good at frontend only role. Since most of my applications were built with spa's in mind, I just use Nextjs primarily to consume the api. So yes, I don't experience a lot of this angst.

The two best days of a NextJs developer life if the day he starts his project and the day he migrates it to React Router.

JS devs having Stockholm syndrome is no news.

yeah, nextjs middleware is garbage

imo, if docs never give a clear example of what something is for, that's a pretty good sign that this was just tacked on without considering any particular use case. i've come to realize that nextjs probably intends for us to use RSCs for most middleware-like behaviors

Just run production with the right flags so it'll log? Or put the app into local and try to replicate? The tone of voice is also completely off.

It seems Middleware in Next.js is not what Middleware is in framework X. This whole thread looks like a complete collection of misunderstandings of Next.js.

I've came to the pain conclusion on Next.js:

It's a bad framework for building full stack apps, but it's better than anything else.

https://x.com/paradite_/status/1941016421934551477