True, however the DX is outstanding for Vercel, and the price is pretty decent enough, even though I know they all just wrap AWS. If I don't have to deal with AWS, I would (and do) pay extra to not do so.

Vercel is not a problem. Pumping millions of dollars into the JS ecosystem through sponsorships and events to define the development landscape in terms of what helps your bottom line... that's bad.

React has RSC because Vercel wanted to fight Shopify. NextAuth was practically bought out by Clerk to serve as sales funnel. <img> tags are marked as "not good" by a leading React framework because the hosting provider behind it wants you to pay them for image optimization.

What Rauch is doing is the developer equivalent of private equity squeezing, and what's insane is how well it's working.

Another example that particularly riles me is that NextJS forces the "edge runtime" (from Vercel) on middleware even when your server is otherwise running in nodejs.

The implication is that you can't do anything that relies on node APIs that edge doesn't support which can be quite limiting.

There's rumour that they're walking back this decision, but it always struck me as an arbitrary way to "encourage" codebases to make themselves compatible with edge which in turn would make deploying using Vercel easier.

(In general I'm reasonably happy using NextJS, though there are many architectural decisions that I find frustrating)

> React has RSC because Vercel wanted to fight Shopify

Dan Abramov (react core team) already said that the React team wanted to do RSC, Vercel were the followers that were eager to integrate and productionize what the React team wanted to do.

NextAuth is a competitor to Clerk auth. How is it bought out? Because Vercel pays an OSS developer to further develop NextAuth, and Guillermo also invested in Clerk? Someone using NextAuth means they're not using Clerk.

This is the most accurate take I've seen on this space. Instead of actual innovation we are being gaslit into overpaying and metered into every aspect of DX.

As I've worked in PE companies, I know all too well how they operate. It's just a shame that developers are naive and clueless about it.

Why shouldn't a hosting provider create a framework optimized for their infrastructure? How is this a bad thing? They aren't stopping anyone from using or creating other frameworks.

Eh I'll disagree with much of that. RSCs are amazing and basically what I've been looking for for quite a while, using TypeScript and JSX as a templating language for HTML, as I used to use PHP, but in a much safer way. Similarly, the image optimization is a good thing too, not necessarily that it goes through Vercel's servers but good in general. Dealing with srcsets with many images can be a pain and you can always use alternative image optimizer too, even open source local ones like sharp. Finally, there are lots of alternatives to what you're stating, no one forces you to use NextJS over, say, Remix or Vite with SSR. You can even not use React at all, or even JS / TS, there are lots of languages that compile HTML together.

You're free to disagree but you didn't disagree at all.

No one is saying they're not useful at all, the problem is Vercel (or really Rauch's entire cartel of companies) strong arm different technologies and topics to fit a narrative that's disproportionately in favor of "use our thing".

RSCs are not amazing if you're not Vercel and don't have access to their closed build format (especially after they killed the serverless output format)

I use image optimizers, I'm not about to go around telling people that img tags are bad.

> Finally, there are lots of alternatives to what you're stating, no one forces you to use NextJS over, say, Remix or Vite with SSR.

Remix had to reject RSCs to start because as one might expect, having one (1) design partner doesn't make for the most fully baked proposition.

Also the "there's other choices" refrain ignores the fact that no one is developing in a vacuum. Vercel is pumping enough money into the ecosystem that the mindshare is shifting towards Next regardless of technical merit. So it's not enough to say "who cares if Vercel distorts what Next is, just use something else"

Other people are building RSC that are faster and better. Expect some announcements later this year.

Remix is adding RSCs in the future, they've already stated. And Vercel isn't as big in influence as you think, many are also having problems with NextJS that are causing them to go elsewhere such as Vite or Remix as I mentioned. There is no monopoly in the frontend.

The DX used to be outstanding for Vercel, but for any new micro-cloud product some story of github-to-deploy or even drag-folder-here is now table stakes; look at Cloudflare for example. Vercel still has the best website dashboard for the other parts of running a website that isn't just deployment.

One problem I saw with Vercel, and a reason why I steered people away, was that they were very slow to react to some of the challenges of serverless workflows, like building their own in-house services to reduce latency or allowing different kinds of serverless tiers for longer-lived workers. You could hit growing pains almost instantly.