While it's simple to run NextJS as a simple Node process that server-renders everything it's not trivial to run it in the way the Vercel does, including running middlewares specifically on a different edge runtime (as well as supporting the `export const runtime = "edge"` directives); incremental static regeneration (statically pre-rendering some set of routes at build time and then hosting them as static files from a CDN rather than computing them at request time), and so on.

I'm guessing this solution doesn't really do that stuff, but for many apps it's not a big deal if it doesn't.

I've noticed a lot of this lately where someone is like this is an alternative to xyz and it does like 2% of what that service or application actually does.

> nothing specific about next.js

But why do people online complain so much that Next is difficult to self-host? Is it just because self-hosting is difficult, or is it something about Next? I suppose the fancy stuff such as "skew protection", which is probably going to be quite important for anyone using server components and server actions, is going to be fiendishly difficult to achieve.

Next.js is maintained by a hosting company. While the core framework is open-source, all their solutions to deploy and scale properly are not open-source.

That puts it at the same level as every other framework, who is not owned by a hosting company and doesn't even have an official solution to scale and deploy "properly"