What bothers me about it is that the routes and layouts have to live in the same hierarchy... Of course this is very usually OK, but layouts have an aspect of v

What bothers me about it is that the routes and layouts have to live in the same hierarchy... Of course this is very usually OK, but layouts have an aspect of visual design while routes follow a logical organization. These are going to change according to different priorities and can be controlled by very different groups/people/authorities. There will be conflicts, and when that happens, you're going to be refactoring code (e.g. to factor out common bits to a component that can suddenly no longer live in the same layout) and moving it around. The fundamental problem is that folders are now being used for two different concerns, which will inevitably lead to conflicts (and developer pain). Edit: oops, you're actually talking about the removal of the option to have routes defined by a file, so that a route must be defined by a folder. I'm completely fine with that. I don't know why people complain about that. All the interesting routes end up with more than one file anyway, and who needs a special extra-simple way to organize the uninteresting routes, which are already simple?