Next initially jumped the shark when they went all-in on server-side rendering. The reason why Vercel did this is clear: client-side rendered apps can be hosted basically for free on Firebase, Cloudflare, or S3, so the only way they can raise their Vercel cloud revenue is by forcing their users into a dynamic-first world, pushing so much complexity and dynamism into the framework that only Vercel could disentangle how to host it effectively. The less-dystopic reasons they communicated as to why customers might want SSR; improved time-to-first-byte and a more PHP/Rails-like programming model; while well-intentioned, ultimately became of questionable value to customers given their choices during implementation.

I do actually believe a more PHP/Rails-like programming model would be beneficial for React; Vercel just missed the extremely important detail in how Rails is so dang productive. Its not their decisions when it comes to HTML templating; its Active Record.