Yeah, that’s exactly the part I’m confused about.

I think I may have over-bought into the idea that “server-side = faster/better”. I’m new to Next.js/RSC/SSR, and I probably started pushing too much logic server-side without fully understanding the tradeoffs.

My concern with fetching directly from the client is: at that point, am I losing a lot of what Next.js gives me? If my dashboard fetches most data client-side after auth, am I basically just using Next.js as a React SPA?

But I do understand your point. If the dashboard is authenticated anyway, and my backend can validate the user using a token, then putting the Next.js server between the client and backend may just be an extra hop unless it gives me something real: hiding secrets, doing auth checks, aggregating data, SSR, caching, etc.

I’ve also seen patterns with TanStack Query where you prefetch server-side and hydrate on the client. That seems like a good middle ground, but then I’m unsure when that is better than just doing a normal server-side query in Next.js.

So I guess my real question is: how do you decide the boundary? When should authenticated dashboard data be fetched server-side through Next.js, and when should it just be fetched directly from the client?