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Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

> My experience with Next.js are that its rough edges are a feature, not a bug. Everything is geared towards you giving up and just using Vercel's hosting

That is my opinion as well. Things like SSR are forced onto users with a very smooth onboarding, but I'm concerned that in practical terms this perceived smoothness can only persist if the likes of us pay the likes of Vercel for hosting our work.

In some degree I feel the whole React ecosystem might have ended up being captured by a corporation. Hopefully it wasn't. Let's see.

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It’s already been captured. Check out the docs for creating a new React app on react.dev:

https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app

It throws you straight at Next.js

Might have? The official React docs recommend Next.

That capture happened... two years ago? (Perhaps there's a good blog post there, if it doesn't exist already)

Hi! I maintain Redux and am deeply involved in the React community, and have spent a lot of time both critiquing the React team's decisions and explaining their decisions to the community.

I actually wrote exactly that blog post and did a conf talk on it earlier this year. I covered why the React team switched to directing users to use "frameworks" to build React apps, the development influences behind React Server Components, why the React docs didn't list tools like Vite as viable options until just a couple months ago, and various other related topics:

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/react-community-20...

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/presentations-reac...

Thank you for the writeups. I learned a lot reading those.

Yes - there's been a very obvious shift in the "official" React positions over the last 2-3 years. It's regrettable that they have moved so sharply away from the simplicity and "doing one thing well" philosophy that made React so successful in the first place. I've used React since those early days and built successful, long-lived projects with it so I'm genuinely sad to see it fall so hard.

Objectively that sadness does not change reality however. At least within my own professional network no-one seems comfortable starting a new project using React today. Almost 100% of the paid front end work I've been involved with myself or discussed with others recently is now using alternatives - most often Vue though I've seen other choices at least seriously considered. I've even had a couple of recruiters I haven't worked with for years suddenly reappear desperately looking for someone to take on React work and openly admit it's because they are struggling to find anyone good who wants to go near it. All of this is a sharp contrast with the market of the early 2020s when React was clearly the preferred front end choice. And all of this is surely a direct response to the push to make React a full stack framework, the added complexity that has introduced, and the apparent capture of official React development by Vercel.

Looking at history, many popular frameworks have been "captured by a corporation" or in the case of React (FB) and .NET (MS), created by one. We mere SEs ride the wave of corporate whims, but everyone knows if and when they tighten the noose too hard everyone will move on to the next hot new thing.

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