In Next.js there are only four commands: - `next dev` starts the dev server with unoptimized code and webpack hot-reload - `next build` compiles all your code

In Next.js there are only four commands: - `next dev` starts the dev server with unoptimized code and webpack hot-reload - `next build` compiles all your code to be ready for production (optimizations enabled and not hot-reloading, pages that aren't dynamic server-side get turned into regular HTML, etc) - `next start` serves that production-ready bundle, with a bare-bones (but production-ready) server - `next export` forces every page to compile down to HTML and gives you a folder of static markup and js you can upload to any static host So yeah, `next start` is indeed production-ready, and similar to what major websites already do. (Also there's no soft, hard, or default dependency between webpack and react, but the starter template uses it to make life easier for devs)