You still need API routes for stuff like data-heavy async dropdowns, or anything else that's hard to express as a pure URL -> HTML, but it cuts down the number of routes you need by 90% or more.
I've been using React since its initial release; I think both RSC and App Router are great, and things are better than ever.
It's the first stack that allows me to avoid REST or GraphQL endpoints by default, which was the main source of frontend overhead before RSC. Previously I had to make choices on how to organize API, which GraphQL client to choose (and none of them are perfect), how to optimize routes and waterfalls, etc. Now I just write exactly what I mean, with the very minimal set of external helper libs (nuqs and next-safe-action), and the framework matches my mental model of where I want to get very well.
Anti-React and anti-Next.js bias on HN is something that confuses me a lot; for many other topics here I feel pretty aligned with the crowd opinion on things, but not on this.
I'm having issues with this gradient too. (Though I'm running a fever after being vaccinated yesterday, so my perception might be different than usual today).
It feels like that optical illusion with disappearing background [1] where your brain attempts to re-tune itself, and it's kind of uncomfortable.
You still need API routes for stuff like data-heavy async dropdowns, or anything else that's hard to express as a pure URL -> HTML, but it cuts down the number of routes you need by 90% or more.