The grass isn't greener. I've built in both - I have a .NET Core/Angular SaaS app that I created and sell, and I've been building greenfield in Next. I much prefer Next.
The duplication in .NET/Angular has never been worth it...not once. And having network calls for everything is unnecessarily painful.
I started the app in 2019, when RESTful SPAs were all the rage. I bought into the hype that you should have API endpoints for everything no matter what, because you'd soon have a mobile app and daemons and this and that.
Turns out, YAGNI. It would've been better to server-side render and only create API endpoints when necessary.
That's what I like about Next: Static generate where you can, server-side render per request where you can't, SPA where necessary - and the layers are as flat as can be. It's the best of all worlds.
That being said, I've worked in .NET for ~16 years now, and I like it more than JavaScript/TypeScript. But I'd still rather develop a web app in Next and put any background services elsewhere in .NET if needed.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I think we're essentially saying the same thing. I would start pretty much 99% of my projects in NextJS. But if I needed to reach for something doing complex logic and scaling to a larger team, I could always add a .Net service to that later.
Look, I like NextJS as much as the next guy - I'd say it's my main working technology right now. And I've never built anything on .Net - I know its characteristics from watching tutorials and reading docs.
My take however is that "web apps" is a very broad world. NextJS gives you a thin API layer. There is no model layer to speak of. You're left fending for yourself in the wild, wild world of JavaScript.
.Net Core, on the other hand, offers a batteries-included, heavy-lifting, opinionated framework, with an immense toolbox and many conventions to guide you. There has to be a reason why people speak such wonders of it. If I had to build something enterprise-y with more than handful of devs it would probably be my choice.