I stopped paying attention when someone recently told me that everyone uses nextjs because “nextjs is meta right now”. Mind you this person has been a developer for about 3 years (not that there’s anything wrong with that but it gives you an idea of whose buying into this stuff)
Vercels devrel is by far the best thing that they do, miles ahead of their engineering.
What's wrong with that? I have no illusions that Next.js is part of a larger strategy to get me to pay money for services. I feel the same way about VSCode and Azure, or Github and Copilot, etc. I don't have any problem with paying money for products that deserve it.
I am not arguing that it is not. I very much agree Next is a product because it very much fits its definition: "an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale.".
But this is wrong by definition: "Many types of software are also products, whether they're VC funded or not."
well to me part of the reason to identify "the meta" is not to go along with it, but so you can develop tactics to counter it -- but maybe not everyone thinks that way
Really though, it's not true that "everyone is using nextjs", so it's not "the meta" anyhow. I think most developers can safely ignore it
I think anyone who says everyone uses X now exists in some kind of bubble when it comes to technology.
I don't want to counter their point just for the sake of countering it but if a person's only supporting argument for using a tool is "everyone uses it" there isn't much of an argument to be had in the first place.
Vercels devrel is by far the best thing that they do, miles ahead of their engineering.