What app router has become has its ideal uses, but if you explicitly preferred the DX of the pages router, you might enjoy TanStack Router/Start even more.
Some libs in the stack are great but they were made pre rsc fad.
Also, you're just wrong? You literally cannot serve RSC components _at all_ even in TanStack Start yet. Even when support for them is added it will be opt-in for only certain kinds of RPC functions and they will work slightly differently than they do in Next.js app router(where they are the default everywhere). RPC != RSC.
Plus you can always stick to using TanStack Router exclusively (zero server at all) and you never will even have to worry about anything to do with RSCs...
It's the first stack that allows me to avoid REST or GraphQL endpoints by default, which was the main source of frontend overhead before RSC. Previously I had to make choices on how to organize API, which GraphQL client to choose (and none of them are perfect), how to optimize routes and waterfalls, etc. Now I just write exactly what I mean, with the very minimal set of external helper libs (nuqs and next-safe-action), and the framework matches my mental model of where I want to get very well.
Anti-React and anti-Next.js bias on HN is something that confuses me a lot; for many other topics here I feel pretty aligned with the crowd opinion on things, but not on this.
Not to mention the whole middleware and being able to access the incoming request wherever you like.
You still need API routes for stuff like data-heavy async dropdowns, or anything else that's hard to express as a pure URL -> HTML, but it cuts down the number of routes you need by 90% or more.
Personally I don’t like it but I do understand the appeal.
But I really, really do not like React Server Components as they work today. I think it's probably better to strip them out in favor of just a route.ts file in the directory, rather than the actions files with "use server" and all the associated complexity.
Technically, you can build apps like that using App Router by just not having "use server" anywhere! But it's an annoying, sometimes quite dangerous footgun to have all the associated baggage there waiting for an exploit... The underlying code is there even if you aren't using it.
I think my ideal setup would be:
1. route.ts for RESTful routes
2. actions/SOME_FORM_NAME.ts for built-in form parsing + handling. Those files can only expose a POST, and are basically a named route file that has form data parsing. There's no auto-RPC, it's just an HTTP handler that accepts form data at the named path.
3. no other built-in magic.
RSCs are React components that call server side code. https://react.dev/reference/rsc/server-components
Actions/"use server" functions are part of RSC: https://react.dev/reference/rsc/server-functions They're the RPC system used by client components to call server functions.
And they're what everyone here is talking about: the vulnerabilities were all in the action/use server codepaths. I suppose the clearest thing I could have said is that I like App Router + route files, but I dislike the magic RPC system: IMO React should simplify to JSON+HTTP and forms+HTTP, rather than a novel RPC system that doesn't interoperate with anything else and is much more difficult to secure.
Vercel has become a merchant of complexity, as DHH likes to say.
I don't care about having things simple to get started the first time, because soon I will have to start things a second or third time. If I have a little bit more complexity to get things started because routing is handled by code and not filesystem placement then I will pretty quickly develop templates to handle this, and in the end it will be easier to get things started the nth time than it is with the simple version.
Do I like the app router? No, Vercel does a crap job on at least two things - routing and building (server codes etc. can be considered as a subset of the routing problem), but saying I dislike app router is praising page router with too faint a damnation.
Align early on wrt values of a framework and take a closer look at the funder's incentives.
An example of this is filesystem routing. Started off great, but now most Next projects look like the blast radius of a shell script gone terribly wrong.
There's also a(n in)famous GitHub response from one of the maintainers backwards-rationalising tech debt and accidental complexity as necessary. They're clearly smart, but the feeling I got from reading that comment was that they developed Stockholm syndrome towards their own codebase.