NextJS stands on the sholders of Shadcn UI and v0

I don't think it's a controversial take anymore to say NextJS is a bloated framework. The app router has continued to be notably slower than the pages router due to the pending development of RSC and turbopack's rewrite of NextJS's internals takes it time. Whilst various compelling alternatives have sprung up (Express + HTMX comes close to offering the flexibility and robustness), thanks Vercel's investments in shadcn/ui and v0 have kept NextJS as the strong choice.

NextJS is getting bloated

It wasn't very long ago where NextJS had a simple architecture, or at least a simple one to grasp. As Vercel took on the vision of React in its holistic adoption of RSC it paid for being the early adopter by losing its simplicity, succumbing to having to have its own set of documentation and dealing with the controversial adoption of canary React.

While they have mostly recovered from this adoption, the slow speeds of RSC and complex mental model have left big scars on the perception of the framework, leaving room for competitors like HTMX.

shadcn/ui and v0

Into the picture steps shadcn/ui. A fresh ui framework which pitches components that give a "Vercel style" built on top of the fast growing radix ui with a high level of polish and most notably, are copied into your repo instead of npm installed. This fits perfectly into the build fast mentality of Vercel. I'm sure there is more to the decision making that goes on under the hood but to an outsider it seems like the perfect fit for their upcoming project v0.

v0 is an ambitious usage of AI to not only to generate UI's (something that ChatGPT can do with enough persistence), but a creative component library driven by React interfaces that can be dropped into any NextJS project. While it was a bit minimal at launch, as with all Vercel products they've stuck with it and developed an unmistakable productivity win for developers.

The Ideal App Project

Thanks to these 2 projects, I think NextJS (or any tool that can utilise them well) is currently the best framework for most app like websites. It is unmistakable that with a template like the prisma turborepo starter you can build an MVP at extreme speeds by utilising v0 to build your initial views with shadcn/ui to power it all. Also, it's hard not to point out turborepo, which is a fantastic streamlined monorepo tool, which I loved implementing and using at GLX Digital).

Unfortunately over the years of perfecting this stack, Vercel has neglected static sites. I still consider Eleventy as the best static site generator for it's simplicity and speed, although I do have a soft spot for Astro's excellent implementation of islands.

It really goes to show that providing a strong ecosystem for your product can make a strong impact on the core products perception. Maybe Vercel has been taking notes from frameworks like Ruby on Rails.