You're right, PHP is SSR by nature. What I meant is that Next.js gives us SSR plus built-in routing for 4 languages, ISR for cache invalidation on ~900K pages, and a React frontend — all in one framework. With PHP we'd need to wire that up separately.

That said, honestly, the ecosystem momentum probably influenced the decision more than a strict technical comparison. Looking back, we probably weren't critical enough about whether we actually needed to move away from PHP. It works and we're happy with it, but I wouldn't claim it was the only valid choice.