You bring up some very valid points and I would agree that next.js is probably not the best choice for large monolithic SaaS platforms.

I do think it CAN work nicely for smaller projects and even larger ones in a microservice architecture.

Here are some points to consider:

1. You don’t have to use Node.js for SSR. Next.js allows you to use their “Edge” runtime by simply exporting a constant in any route or page. This allows one to implement a more robust solution for handling these requests. You should always be separating data fetching logic from rendering. This is why I think blocking the delivery of HTML to the browser to wait on data is not always the best solution.

The solution currently is to use react suspense which is basically the same thing as serving a static page that fetches data. The only difference is it’s done in an optimized way.

2. Node.js can be configured to be multi threaded via worker threads.

3. All of the node.js, react and next.js teams are diligently working to address these concerns in subsequent releases of their frameworks.

So you might be asking, even though I CAN make next.js work for large scale projects, is it worth it? Well, that’s something each project manager will have to answer for themselves.

I can tell you that there are plenty of large platforms that use next.js.

So I wouldn’t go so far as to say that next JS sucks.