Early 2026 brought a cluster of major events to the Next.js ecosystem. The Edge Runtime effectively retreated, Cloudflare released vinext, a complete reimplementation of Next.js, and React moved to a Foundation model. Taken one by one, these are separate pieces of news. Taken together, they become a single question: where do Next.js and the React it builds on stand right now?
This series works through that question over five posts. It looks, in order, at how decisions about runtime and infrastructure were reversed, what drove a third party to reimplement the framework, and what the change in governance means for users. The last two posts then ask "so why use it at all" along two practical axes, performance benchmarks and the cost of switching.
These posts are tied to a specific moment, so their conclusions may change over time. The evidence and benchmarks behind each judgment are left in the text as they are, though, so they can keep serving as a baseline for comparing later changes.