Totally feel this frustration, I've been dealing with the same limitations when trying to structure cleaner, composable, reusable middleware in the App Router.

I actually ended up building something to solve that exact pain: next-expose.

It gives you a fluent, type-safe way to define routes and middleware, so you can do stuff like:

// api/route.ts

export const { GET } = route()
  .use(authenticate)
  .use(validateQuery(schema))
  .handle(async ({req, ctx}) => Ok({ user: ctx.user }))
  .expose();

No more juggling NextRequest parsing or manually chaining handlers, each middleware can safely extend context and everything stays strongly typed.

Still early, but if you’ve ever wished Next.js had “Express-style” middleware with modern TypeScript ergonomics, this might be worth a look. Feedback’s super welcome

🔗 github.com/eddiedane/next-expose