Ah this was me when I moved to next 13 and finally said fuck it and moved back to plain templates and some webpack (for ts for doing non ajaxy js). Even as a backend/platform I actually gave the modern JS ecosystem a really decent try (about 2 years on next/react alone). And before that I had written fairly complex fe code in typescript (granted these weren't doc oriented apps but were more like IDEs). The moment I had to serve static-ish sites the complexity just ballooned!