NextJS keeps winning?

Look, I know this might sound redundant in 2026. We’ve been hearing “NextJS is winning” for what feels like forever now. But here we are, and it’s still true. While the whole ecosystem basically watched NextJS kill pure React, the framework somehow still exists despite huge backlash of the Vercel Monopoly.

The Vercel Monopoly is real

TBH, Vercel started it so they basically have the say over it, but it just feels off when they advertise everything as a happy, new, opensrc feature that only works with them. Also it seems like they’re getting more and more control of how react is being shaped. One thing to mention though is that this was Vercel’s “Vision” and it def sounded good for the most of us and the rest just adopted it, so we can’t really complain, so our best bet is to innovate or restart the stack (tanstack pun intended)?

Tanstack is trying, but…

TanStack seems like they’re actually trying to replace Next and the Vercel Ecosystem in general (eg: creating their own ai-sdk) and obviously Theo is an example who replaced Next with Tanstack Start, but for most webdev’s NextJS is just fundamentally become a comfort zone where everything is way easier then relearning a framework that is actually kind of just the same? Build time’s can prob make the transition reasons more obv, right?

The build time problem nobody solved

Here’s the thing though: NextJS build times are genuinely terrible. Like, embarrassingly slow. It’s been a problem for years. Still is.

But you know what? People live with it. They optimize where they can, they wait. Because the alternative—switching to something else and losing all that ecosystem goodness seems worse than just accepting it as part of the deal.

That’s a dangerous position to be in if you’re competing with NextJS. Your framework could be 10x faster and have better DX, but if it doesn’t have the gravity that NextJS does, nobody’s moving.

So what’s the verdict?

Is NextJS the best framework? Probably not objectively. Is it the smartest choice for most projects? Yeah, pretty much. It’s the path of least resistance. It’s what your team knows (assuming you have a job). It’s what every developer blog post recommends. It’s what your clients expect.

Not everything is about technical superiority. Sometimes it’s about ecosystem weight, community momentum, and the fact that switching costs are real.

So yeah, NextJS keeps winning. Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s become too big to fail (just like chrome, windows and iOS/MacOS).