[seer]

I still remember the joy of using the flagship rails application - basecamp. Minimal JS, at least compared to now, mostly backend rendering, everything felt really fast and magical to use.

Now they accomplished this by imposing a lot of constraints on what you could do, but honestly it was solid UX at the time so it was fine.

Like the things you could do were just sane things to do in the first place, thus it felt quite ok as a dev.

React apps, _especially_ ones hosted on Next.js rarely feel as snappy, and that is with the benefit of 15 years of engineering and a few order of magnitude perf improvement to most of the tech pieces of the stack.

It’s just wild to me that we had faster web apps, with better organizarion, better dev ex, faster to build and easier to maintain.

The only “wins” I can see for a nextjs project is flexibility, animation (though this is also debatable), and maybe deployment cost, but again I’m comparing to deploying rails 15 years ago, things have improved there as well I’m sure.

I know react can accomplish _a ton_ more on the front end but few projects actually need that power.