I recently switched from NextJS — where every one of the dozens of projects I built would have 7-8 minute deployment times, regardless of hosts — to React Router, and saw my deployment times drop to 1-2 minutes.

Aside from some difficulty with mastering environment variables, I’ve been delighted with the change and will probably not look back.

Is server-rendered HTML that bad for 2026 web or is everyone building complex apps?

Many of my customers insists on using Next.js or similar but when I browse their website I don't get the point. They are downloading and executing megabytes of JS while in-page interactions tends to be limited to few basic stuff. Never seen one of their project requiring offline mode. Maybe that's being able to easily replace a [FRAMEWORK] dev with another.

I made two serious attempts to get into front end web development, around 5 years apart. Both times I started with the most popular framework. Both times the most popular framework was something different before I even finished the project.

Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?

As a cpp developer I had to chuckle there. And I thought our compile times were bad.

I've been pretty happy with TanStack start for a medium-sized project. I would not know how its build time would compare to Next, but our similarly sized Remix (sorry, React router v7) app takes longer to build.

TanStack just has a nicer mental model overall and works great with TanStack query for cache I validation and stuff like that.

Remix was promising but there was so much ceremony in registering API routes and stuff. Tanstack just lets you define server functions arbitrarily with no ceremony.

Might be worth a spike and some tokens to ask Claude Code to migrate and test the build time and ergonomics.

Are you on turbopack? It's available on Next 16 and just took our build times down from 6 minutes to 2 minutes