Similarly to my post about Bun, I want to start a list about Next.js things that drive me insane. I love the page rendering, SSR and static generation of React that give Next.js great performance boost.
Unfortunately, Next.js falls short in almost all aspects of a web framework that I would expect. As a backend developer that uses MVC frameworks a lot (especially Symfony), I have a lot of problems with Next.js. Here is a non-complete list in no particular order. I will try to update this post as time goes on.
- Sitemap generation does not generate a sitemap index, making it pretty useless
- No built-in auth layer
- No built-in i18n layer
- No built-in event system
- Makes integration of an ecosystem unnecessarily hard. Look at Symfony’s bundles and event system which is very plug and play. Symfony lets you add 2FA authentication with one composer command. Next.js couldn’t even dream of that.
- Getting the current request outside of a server component or endpoint file is near-impossible
- This makes building a custom auth or event layer even harder. These are things you can’t build in one file and you are forced to pass the request to every function that needs it manually. A global would fix this. Symfony does this with dependency injection.
- You only get one middleware
- This one sucks a lot, because a lot of features like auth and i18n that come built-in with other frameworks rely on a middleware. You need one for auth and one for i18n, yet Next.js only lets you have one. You need to combine them and there’s no proper way to do that. On top of that, the concept of middleware and weird regex-ing you have to do for it is horrible on its own.
- Random, unreadable and undebuggable errors
- Almost no dev tools or profiling
- React 19 broke next/link
- Found nothing about this online, but updating to React 19 completely broke this component for me. Downgrading to React 18 fixed it.
- No built-in form handling
- Need to rely on third party stuff for something so basic
This list, together with the list of problems with Bun, shows to me how the JavaScript ecosystem vastly prefers new and shiny innovations over any sort of support and stability. If I had the time and money, I would probably just build my own framework.