The javascript ecosystem is pretty resilient and will bounce back, but what will happen after the capture and stagnation of Next.js? What is it likely to be replaced with?
It seems like there's movement at the moment towards cloud-agnostic infrastructure which seems right to me, but what happens to the frontend space as a whole?
I think Next + SSG jumpstarted a pretty cool revolution in web hosting, at least, where now you can easily use any of a dozen different frameworks and host them anywhere from Vercel to Netlify to Cloudflare Pages to an S3, etc.
These things come in cycles. Today's simple, elegant indie darling is tomorrow's bloated behemoth. Happens to everything from JS frameworks to browsers to entire ecosystems, in this case the Web itself.
I doubt anything we discuss today will still be relevant in ten years. Maybe not even five...
Can we stop using that terrible term?
I get what you're trying to say: I too have very strong feelings about Vercel, it's lock in, it's operating model, and some underlying technical decisions they've made. But individually those are points that (if the company is listening) Vercel will address or go out of business.
There's no nuance in that way of thinking. Market forces will determine whether or not the company will succeed. But it's the obligation of the decision makers in your company to decide whether or not the problems that Vercel has are worth the risks and to what degree. There may be a tipping point - an enshittification point - at which the risks are no longer tenable. The way the term is commonly used doesn't make that clear - you've basically declared that the company will go south. Maybe it will, or maybe they'll listen to their customers.
React enshittifies together (already happened) and slowly starts to die. People stop going crazy over SSR and go back to simpler HTML/CSS/JS pages.