I'm being rather snarky here, but the main point of front-end JS UI frameworks is to exist and to survive in their environment. For this purpose they have evolved to form a parasymbiotic relationship with others in their environment, for example with influencers. The frameworks with the best influencers win out over older ones that do not have the novelty value anymore and fail to attract the best influencers.

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.

> Are people using react for non-SPA’s?

Imagine a page that loads html during the first load, and then performs client-side routing during subsequent navigations. Is it an SPA? Is it not an SPA?

After Tanstack Start, Next.js seems even less intuitive. While it remains a viable option due to its established momentum, it feels quite alien to backend devs, esp with its unconventional defaults.

Not me, but I can imagine it happening.

JSX is a nice server side templating language. There a lot of people who aren't dependency conscious, and a lot of people who love react, and there is quite a bit of overlap in those two groups. I've used bun + preact_render_to_string for server side JSX templates before and it was nice. When I did it seemed that bun somewhat embraced react, and I could imagine react being the path of least resistance to server-side JSX there for some of the folks in the aforementioned groups.

The point is JavaScript developers rediscovering PHP, Spring MVC, ASP.NET MVC, Rails,.....

And to sell Vercel on top.

Instead of going:

Fetch index.html -> Fetch JS bundle -> Evaluate -> Fetch /users/me

You do:

Fetch index.html (your page is rendered at this point) -> rehydrate with client side JS for interactivity in the background

It's a pretty smart solution I think, and many people are still sleeping on the whole SSR topic.