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0 pointsdrawfloat13d ago0 comments

Vercel has slowly taken over Facebook's position as being the employer of the main developers of React. There's a debate to be had over how much they 'control' it or not, but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.

5 or so years ago, Next was a pretty solid option to quickly build up a non SPA, when combined with the static export function. It wasn't ideal, but it worked and came batteries included. Over time it's become more bloated, more complicated, and focused on features that benefit from Vercel's hosting – and static builds can't take advantage of them.

These newer features seem of limited benefit, to me, for even SPAs. Why is there still not a first class way of referencing API routes in the client code that provides typing? Once you reach even medium scale, it becomes a mess of inteprolated string paths and manually added shared response types.

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jvidalv13d ago

Exactly, this why if I use next.js I always hijack the api routes and use Elysia, it comes with something called eden that makes the typing e2e fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

As a side note, I'm slowly moving out of Next.js, as you said, is bloated, full of stuff that is just noise and that benefits them (more network requests more money) for little user benefit.

Right now for me the gold standard is Vite + Tanstack Router. (And Elysia for api/server, but thats unrelated).

mexicocitinluez13d ago

> but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.

There is a decent bit of history around that page and whether some things should go in a collapsible div and whether that was prioritizing certain frameworks over other ones.

One thing I'm still salty about is that CRA isn't mentioned anywhere (in the entire site). It's like it never existed.

acemarke13d ago

Hi! I played a major part in getting that "installation" page rewritten to actually mention other tools like Vite :)

The general TLDR is:

- CRA was listed in the _old_ docs site

- The new docs site coincided with the React team emphasizing "frameworks" to provide an all-in-one build experience and hopefully lead to better apps.

- That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.

- CRA broke when React 19 came out in Dec 2024. This caused problems for beginners.

- I pushed the React team to both deprecate CRA and finally rewrite the setup pages to list other build tools as valid options.

I wrote up a much longer background of what happened around the "frameworks" push and this docs page here:

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/react-community-20...

And here's the issue I filed pushing the React team to deprecate CRA (after some online discussion):

- https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/17004

and a follow-up PR where I tried to rewrite the initial rather confusing post-CRA-deprecation "Creating Your Own Framework" page with a more relevant "Creating a React App" page:

- https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/pull/7618

but the overall point of _all_ of this is that CRA was unmaintained as of 2023, the community had _already_ moved on to Vite, and all this was an attempt to get the React docs to reflect that reality.

mexicocitinluez12d ago

Hey acemark,

I've been following you and some of the other main React devs.

> That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.

I had followed a decent bit of this back on Twitter, and appreciate you guys trying to make the documentation better (despite all of the drama that came up as a result).

And while it's definitely slowed down a bit, I still randomly see a "What happened to CRA" on the r/react sub.

I guess what bothers me the most is that CRA was not only mine, but quite a few others first introduction to React. And it's just weird that it wasn't even called out in the new docs (even back in 2022-2023). Like it had never existed.

Regardless, I appreciate that you guys care enough to help move React in the right direction. A lot happened while this was going on, and you guys put up with A LOT during this process.

robertlagrant13d ago

I'm trying to build a nextjs app and it's quite painful. It seems to be more and more focused on SSR, which I don't care about (looking for a static app that calls separate API endpoints). That would have been fine in the NextJS I remember from a few years ago, where static and SSR seemed equally viable, but I can't be bothered now. I'm going to try Tanstack Start.

BoorishBears13d ago

99% of what you see with the word "server" vs "client" is actually orthogonal to SSR is that wasn't clear.

The React team (really Vercel + Shopify) decided to use the supremely misleading names "Server Component" and "Client Component" for two things that do not affect CSR vs SSR.

Even if you label the root of your app "use client" (thus opting out of all the new complexity around RSC and server actions), it's still getting rendered server side.

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