This is a strawman. You're misinterpreting the word "serious". They are using it to mean scalable, not about unimportance/ability. At some point in the scaling process, it will be more effective to scale to another machine than stay on a single one at which point you need a lot of other primitives like the article mentions. E.g. a shared cache with proper invalidation mechanisms. If you dont need scale, then you're right, you dont have to worry about this. I will also note that it is slightly odd to use a framework like next.js if you arent (or planning on) running at scale because most of its features (e.g. SSR) are entirely performance oriented. Essentially, the whole point of the article is that despite being "open source" you cannot run next.js at scale yourself without a massive investment of your own.