Agreed, nextJS feels incredibly overloaded with lots of terms that seem to conflate. I tried to use the new app router, but it felt infuriatingly opaque to me,

Agreed, nextJS feels incredibly overloaded with lots of terms that seem to conflate. I tried to use the new app router, but it felt infuriatingly opaque to me, so I just went back to pages. Fortunately you can use the newest nextJS v13 and still have access to the old Pages system.