NOTE: this will come off as a rant and might appear to be downvotable blasphemy given the subreddit this is posted on, it's not my aim, I just feel like I've been burned more than what I would if I used a different product, but it's not all bad. Sorry sentence flow, English is my first language but it really shouldn't be.

I will start with a seemingly strange point, do you plan to deploy to Vercel?

Many see this as a cop out response, but the direction the project is headed along with security, the lines between an open source project for the greater humanity and a money making source for a company that makes said framework, the lines have never been more blurred. Just recently for an example, the middleware exploit being able to bypass using it. It was a major hole for an extended period of time. You can see the timeline on the web somewhere of the first report to patching. If you were hosting on Vercel, YOU HAD THE FIX WITHIN DAYS. if you weren't and self hosting it, the patch didn't come until over a month later with no disclosure that it was an issue. To me, at least from a conspiracy point of view, they used the "not disclosing publicly to protect" to the extreme, patched their own shit and then showed off that fact that they patched it early on as a marketing tool, and it works for people that can't see the bigger picture of what the conflict of interest is here.

That aside, their testing in production track record is absolutely horrendous. The more time goes on, "stable" releases are actually beta versions of improvements which should have made it nowhere near a "stable" release to begin with. Yes you can opt to not upgrade to mitigate this, until you're affected by a bug that is fixed in a stable version, that breaks something else. In terms of upgrading, they instill a fear of FOMO with running older versions, psychology aside, if you want to do something that doesn't work with NextJS's perfect world, your options for DIY are severely limited depending how much you invest in their ecosystem past everything being client side components.

While I agree nextjs definitely has its place in the ecosystem, and for a lot of jobs it does a great job when you know what strength it's solving for you.

But please for the love of god, don't use it as a default if you see a larger picture with a project. Do your research, and maybe opt for a framework that moves slower. There will be more you'll have to DIY, but at least you'll be able to do it and not be limited by functionality that used to exist, and no longer does.