You're not alone. There's a lot to really like and appreciate, but there's also a lot of opinionated decisions baked in, and almost inevitable fighting against

You're not alone. There's a lot to really like and appreciate, but there's also a lot of opinionated decisions baked in, and almost inevitable fighting against the framework. The good news is, there are good alternatives. Remix is worth a close look; if you accept up front that a js server runtime is required, it's fantastic. Or, there's Vite, which (with vite-plugin-ssr) covers most Next.js use cases with fewer opinions and less framework magic.