Yea I give stuff like this at least a major revision or two for things to settle. Maybe Next.js v15.

My thinking as well. Reflects poorly on the company. I'm not in the market for whatever they're doing but if I was my impression is they have a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee and reimplementing stuff no one asked for.

“This technology we heavily rely on is completely changing the way it works. Should we update now and get into the ecosystem?”

“Nah, this guy on hacker news said we’re dumb hipsters for adopting the new normal for react. We should stay on the old versions.”

That’s like saying you don’t trust a company because they updated from PHP 5 to PHP 8.2

More like "hey we just spent 8 months of investor money on a rewrite and this works much worse than the previous solution. But hey, they're throwing this out and the new thing is ReactWebLogic, let's do a new rewrite!"

This might be fair if this was a rewrite in a vacuum (or took anywhere close to 8 months) but it wasn't. We were also undergoing a large design refresh for the site, which was going to require a ton of work on the existing site anyway. Using the opportunity to also update to the newest version of the technology we were using wasn't nothing, but I'd argue it was also probably a pretty small marginal increase.

Yeah I do wonder what the VCs think of these kinds of big bang rewrites, whether they know or care

Author, here!

It’s a fair question. I think it’s a question I was hoping to address in this article, especially with the incremental migration pattern. If you already have a Next.js site, it’s honestly not too bad. If you’re not on Next.js, well, that’s a big migration either way. But considering server components during that migration might not be unreasonable — you’re writing React components either way, albeit RSC is a more complex mental model.

More specifically though: The docs migration took me about a month-and-change of work. Some of that was moving all of our styling to Tailwind. Some of it was (optional) RSC code gymnastics that I mentioned in the advanced patterns section, to see how many kB we could leave on the server. And much of it was the information architecture changes I talked about in that earlier blog post.

Meanwhile, marketing took us three months, but that number is complicated too, since we were rebranding the site, touching every component and page anyways. Most paths had like, 2 minutes of direct RSC work. Moving the calls to the data layer from outside our components to inside.

IMO not bad. In both cases, we had to work on the whole site, anyways. Might as well creep the scope a bit and move to the new React thing, since it looks like that’s where the puck is going.