Next.js reinvents so many things that already exist in PHP (also Python, Ruby). Check out for example what is already possible with Symfony in their docs[0]. Next.js "biggest" release just introduced middleware and html rendering with zero client-side js !
What people like in tools like next.js is not the framework itself but the abstraction over infrastructure, using platforms like vercel. Imagine a platform as cheap, modern and easy to use as vercel but for PHP, basically shared hosting on steroids. Do you believe people would still care so much about Next.js in that scenario ?
Symphony itself brought quite a few concepts from Rails to the PHP community. You can call the flow of ideas across communities "reinvention" but I think it's super healthy.
The web platform has had been an oddity in asking you to entirely switch languages when moving between backend development and frontend development. I think one of the most appealing pieces of these Javascript frameworks is that you can build everything in one common language. (You can—but don't have to.)
Fine-grained developer control of when data is fetched, when components are rendered, how they are rendered, and where they are rendered (server vs client) becomes a really welcome advancement.
People just like React and the idea of decoupling frontend and backend ( Pretty sure just a few percentage of users use Nextjs with api routes and just use it as Create-React-App with SSG and SSR capabilities ).
I haven't used Vercel that much in production but what does it bring compared to Heroku or cheaper and open source self hosted alternatives like Dokku or even caprover with it's really good UI and can deploy any backend as long as it's Dockerizable ?
Dart strikes a perfect balance between dynamic and strongly typed languages. Dart is better than JS, typescript and java combined. It has a great VM that makes development easy, an AOT compiler that generates native binaries like Go, and can also compile to Js just like typescript. The language is familiar, easy to learn and the type system is very powerful, sound and non-nullable. Dart SDK includes everything you might need: standard library, code formatter, linter, static analysis, JIT and AOT compiler, package manager, dev tools etc. Right now Dart found its niche in Flutter(which is great imo), but I wish there was a backend framework like Django or rails that would leverage this amazing language.
Flutter web is amazing. I have the opportunity to build a side project with it last year, and I just love it. Compared to trying to build web applications with React or Vue, Flutter doesn't have to deal with the baggage of the JavaScript ecosystem.
Not sure how mature it is, but if I ever have a need to build another backend server I'll try it. I tend to prefer managed solutions now like Google's Firebase, which integrates so well with Flutter ( obviously because Google has a vested interest in you using their services)
Wikimedia recently decided to abandon their in-house javascript framework in favor of Vue.js[0]. That doesn't mean wikipedia will turn into a vue.js single page app but they'll use it to progressively enhance some parts of the frontend or their internal tools/editors etc. Looking at some of the suggested features like the new search[1] it seems that vue.js could be used in this scenario. Does that mean they'll ship the entire vue.js runtime alongside jquery that is already used?
I had ~3300 bookmarks and just decided to bulk delete half of them that lived in random folders. Now i'm at 1400. Most of them are CS/tech/coding related. When I save a link I make myself believe its something important that I'll find useful in the future. The truth is I don't even know what is in my bookmarks anymore and I hardly ever go back to manually check what javascript article I bookmarked one year ago. Nowadays, I just use firefox awesome bar that, by default, searches through my bookmarks when I type something to search for. I also find tags much better at organizing bookmarks than folders and I'm happy firefox supports this feature.
[0]https://github.com/orgs/canonical/repositories?q=&type=all&l...