Mostly to double check my assumptions and try to dig around and see if there is a downside to Next I'm blind to. Or any gotchas or problems that arise that I wouldn't expect a year or two into the project. Maybe excessive due diligence?

But I'd rather ask around while I have the chance before committing a ton of code.

With large community support and coperate backing, I think Next is well setup for the long term (5-10 years). I can't think of any direct downsides, however Next does "force" you in a way of writing application, which I personally think is a good thing, since it provides standardization and structure to projects (for example, routing).

Next can still be very flexible, with things like catch-all routes, you could even add another router on top of Next. It also supports customizing the Webpack configuration if needed, but there's plugins for almost all cases that I have needed to use (PWA/service worker, CSS/Sass which is now built-in, etc).

I think Next is one of the safer option for new projects.

> I think Next is well setup for the long term (5-10 years).

No way. Take as an example one of the most used JS libraries in history (jQuery): released in 2006, and it has been already 4 years or so that it's been slowly substituted by React/Vue/Angular. So, jQuery has had around 10 years of solid development and usage. Saying that Next.js will have between 5 and 10 years of live, it's not realistic (perhaps React will, but Next is going to be dead in 2 years when yet another framework appears that is better/faster/smaller/more featured).

> Next can still be very flexible, with things like catch-all routes, you could even add another router on top of Next.

I don't think this is the case? We were looking to add React Router (to add client side routing). And the only way that seemed achievable was by hacking around (https://dev.to/toomuchdesign/next-js-react-router-2kl8)

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm also a fan of opinionated frameworks. I was an early Rails developer and over years of freelancing seeing both framework codebases and micro-framework or from-scratch codebases I believe frameworks make decisions for you that are unimportant to your work in 80-90% of use cases.

Since you're the OP, and you were an early rails developer, I have to ask why you are more in favor of next than rails at this point?

I live in Berlin now and Ruby isn't very popular here. It's much more difficult to find Ruby/Rails developers than React developers. The tech industry here is growing but still in its infancy, there aren't a glut of devs who started working with Rails when it was a hot new thing that have an appreciation for it. Javascript and Python are very popular, Ruby not so much.

A lot of my friends in SF tend to pick up a new language every year or two. Is this type comparatively rare in Berlin or are people just digging into a long list of other languages first?

From the jobs I see Javascript, Python, Java & iOS are pretty much the entire market so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to actually work with other langs and get paid for it.

Pretty much every language I've learned, I've learned on my own and only possibly later gotten paid for using.

For example, I picked up Elixir (which I currently make money using) by rewriting a Rails app into Phoenix four years ago. That app never made me any money, but it did provide a great motivation for learning Elixir!

Similarly, I'm learning Rust now. I'm going through books and videos, building toy projects and slowly picking it up. I've never been paid to write Rust, but that will likely change in the future.

Other languages, like Racket and 8088 assembly I've never been paid to write and likely never will but I don't regret exploring them a bit.

Lack of nested routing is a pretty major downside for any moderately-complex dashboard app.