It is a solution when all your developers are bootcamped on react for 6 months and don't know how to run a proper back-end. Managers like it because their front-end react dev can add a back-end feature NOW and in 1 hour.

My experience is that even seasoned frontend devs get confused about what happens where and for what reason.

It’s awful and I’m pretty sad that it seems the entire nodejs community has adopted next.js as standard. All projects I’ve been involved with use it and none of them use any SSR at all.

That's mostly because `create-react-app` was abandoned. There is no default project template for React SPA, so everyone just uses Next, even if they don't need SSR.

I didn't know create-react-app was abandoned. What was wrong with it?

Nothing, it just required resources to maintain, which Facebook doesn't want to dedicate.

That's the naive answer. I don't think the promotion of Vercel in React docs and the discontinuation of create-react-app are unrelated.

vite exists? what are you even talking about

A lot of things exist. But to become a go-to standard a good timing is required. Next.js was getting popular right at the time Facebook abandoned 'create-react-app' template, and many people adopted Next.js even if they didn't need SSR. Vite didn't exist back then.

But this works fine, I use it for all my side projects: https://vite.dev/guide/#scaffolding-your-first-vite-project

Add in tailwind and a router of choice (I love wouter) and you've got 90% of what you need to build most applications. Vite is so much simpler than webpack and the rest that came before, it's a tiny amount of work to do this.

It adds notable complexity, and I sense that the whole server/client side component reality is wildly ill-understood.