This is not about comments on HN, it's about communication on their site.

I have enough experience to be able to know what it is from a quick summary, but I still don't quite get it.

It's an epic communications failure.

Vercel marketing team has created a huge problem on the funnel whereby a lot of casual / semi-interested visitors are effectively bouncing without having ingested a nominal understanding of 'what it is'.

Technology is not quite like brand marketing where 'Jordan / Kapernick / Yeezy' do the selling, it's generally something we need to understand in order for it to make sense. The 'aha' moment can only come after that.

Vercel does face the additional challenge that 'Next.JS' is not a widely known framework, and they have to additionally explain that, but it's not an insurmountable problem.

This is not uncommon in SaaS actually, but it is kind of ridiculous.

As a rule of thumb: if people feel the need to visit your Wikipedia page to understand 'what you do' - then the marketing department is acting against the best interest of the company, and is literally a source of confusion instead of clarity.

Perhaps Vercel is ok having visitors bounce who don't understand what they do with the marketing copy as is. Maybe they're not trying to be everything for everyone?

No, there's no such thing. It's just bad marketing. Everyone wants more customers.

It probably means the vector of spread is word of mouth and other things.

SaaS companies are notorious for this.