I'm not really convinced the serverless approach is a good default. It adds a lot of complexity that you might not need at all. I'm also not a fan of Javascript

I'm not really convinced the serverless approach is a good default. It adds a lot of complexity that you might not need at all. I'm also not a fan of Javascript on the backend, but that's really more of a personal preference. But it is quite common to have backends in different languages, so the focus on server components and Next.js in the React world felt a bit like some tunnel vision to me. It was focused on an entirely different use case than mine, which is of course perfectly fine as not all features need to target my use cases. But pushing a more narrow and specialized setup as the default does seem like the wrong choice to me. And the serverless approach very likely was the reason they used HTTP headers for this kind of privileged communication between parts of the application. Which is a terrible idea for environments where you can't be sure those headers are never set by users.