Yikes. Your experience in no way matches mine, nor that of many others I've worked with over the years. Using NextJs doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to understand the fundamentals of how your webapp works, but IMHO / IME it strikes a great balance when it comes to DX and convenience, with direct extensibility and support to drop a layer down to do things by hand; IOW, yeah there's some magic but it's the good kind. I'd be very interested to hear more about your "nightmare", and what circumstances led to the painted-corner of depending on beta versions of core libraries. Care to elaborate?