Next.js 16.2 Shows What an AI-Native Framework Actually Looks Like

Are people moving away from Next.js, or just getting less patient with it? Over the past year, the mood around Next.js has shifted. It is still widely used, but the excitement is more mixed than it used to be. A lot of developers have become frustrated with the size of the framework’s mental model, especially around the App Router, caching, rendering boundaries, and the growing number of rules you need to keep in your head to understand why something behaves the way it does. Some teams have moved away from it entirely, usually for reasons that have less to do with ideology and more to do with local development performance or the feeling that too much of the framework has become implicit. I understand that reaction. Next.js is not a lightweight layer over React anymore. It is a full application runtime with strong opinions about rendering, data fetching, caching, bundling, and deployment. That makes it more capable, but it also makes it easier to feel like you are working inside a large