See the various other comments for concrete examples of why nextjs sucks and the team at vercel is incompetent when it comes to auth, middleware, caching, and just generally maintaining a usable framework without brutal migrations and api breakages.
They have made egregious mistakes that go far beyond "move fast and break things" and well into "we should have the lawyers join this call".
I was pretty involved in their stack back in the day, it was a good alternative to Django at the time for simple plug and play admin apps, and to this day i think they had the simplest OAuth setup of any framework I've used.
The real issues were the super tight coupling with MongoDB and their decision to roll their own package ecosystem instead of just using npm from day one.
My experience is that a lot of people on this forum are afraid to voice negative opinions on tools they use at work.
Seen a lot of people in my professional circles shit on Next/Vercel over beers, but then go to work every day and bang out Next because it's what their manager chose 5 years ago.
Vercel can only ride that wave until the people who hate their product are the decision makers.
so instead of learning a useful transferrable skill they talked to their magic mirror and got an output that approaches correctness without the necessary knowledge to verify it or maintain it going forward without their magic mirror.
To quote the author:
"The insane part is I didn't write a single line of this code.
All of this was created through conversations with the Cursor AI agent.
I don't even know how we got here with AI."
This is about as interesting as your average TODO MVC tutorial.
1. Vercel / Next are complete technical trash wrapped in egregious vendor lock-in. This directly influences their desire to steer the react foundation in a direction that aligns with their roadmap for Vercel/Next.
2. Their CEO thought it would be a good idea to have a photo op with perhaps the most controversial figure in world politics. This just means he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and likely needs a handler.