Next.js is infuriating

Posted by Bogdanp 9/2/2025

1030 points | 579 commentspage 9

parham 9/2/2025|

I didn’t fully read the post, but pretty sure they have a good point. I inherited next.js on a project it is the absolute worst framework.

I don’t need/want to elaborate.

diebillionaires 9/2/2025||

We moved away from nextjs for similar reasons. The architecture is not flexible enough at this time to satisfy most “advanced” teams needs.

ramon156 9/2/2025||

Next js is magic just like laravel, it's nice when you expect magic and not nice when you like to understand what's going on.

dominicrose 9/2/2025|

Laravel is easy to learn and use and get started with. No compiler. No javascript on the back-end. Eloquent is a good ORM. There's not much magic, no async/await. Or course you should not use Livewire. It's really terrible!

0xblinq 3 days ago||

You must be building extremely simple/minimal frontends with near to zero interactivity requirements. Otherwise "no javascript" and "no livewire" just doesn't work.

yasserf 9/2/2025||

I agree it’s pretty frustrating, but I do really like the SSR capabilities

I’m divide my frontend and backend via pikku, that way I can continue using normal server side functions but optionally spin up a seperate api service if needed.

Haven’t really tested it on vercel as much, but it ignores middleware on the nextJS side unless it’s for frontend code.

https://pikku.dev/docs/runtimes/nextjs-app

Disclaimer: I’m the pikku core developer

Ambix 9/2/2025||

Hehe, great post. Just use Hono or Hono X. It's so easier to reason about what's going on for me, mostly backend guy.

matt-p 9/2/2025||

Do you know what, it uses to be OK in the early days with pages and not too much magic/abstraction.

These days vite is far far nicer.

andix 9/2/2025||

Next.js turned out to be worse than PHP.

throw_m239339 9/2/2025|

Next.js turned out to be worse than JEE, which is ironic to say the least. People moved to Node.js at first place because the Java ecosystem was "too bloated". Fast forward 15 years later, the Node.js community has adopted its own flavor of JEE. And rince and repeat, new developers will deem Next.js too bloated therefore they are going to go with another platform that doesn't have that stigma...

markusstrasser 9/2/2025||

the interesting web problems (collaborative tools, creative software, scientific computing) have to fight against a framework ecosystem designed for the blandest landing pages.

Nextjs and most web frameworks assume you're building an e-commerce site that has to only differentiate on loading speeds.

fkarg 9/2/2025||

we started a purely-frontend project with nextjs but moved to react-router pretty soon. Sure, it can be convenient (when it works), but you can't really see or understand how or how to control it, and black magic breaking is the least of what you want. Much happier now.

_pdp_ 9/2/2025|

The app router is certainly challenging. This is why we stick to the page router and it works really well. There are some cases where the app router comes handy though.

Honestly, nextjs is not that bad and I would go as far as saying that it is perhaps the best web framework I have ever experienced but it does come with its own problems which might be overwhelming for beginners.

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