speaking of next.js, it's always fun to watch web tech come full circle back to "maybe we should render this stuff before we send the bits, since servers and CDNs are real real good at sending bits real real fast, instead of making everyone render the same static stuff a billion times per day client-side". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type was generating static blogs back in 2001, and that's still a great idea 20 years later. I'm glad that "modern" JS thinking has finally caught up :)
One of my tasks at work is to support a website that was built 20 years ago. We keep talking about updating it to modern web standards. It sounds like, if we wait a little longer, our 20 year old site will be using modern web development techniques already ;-)
The javascript community is starting to move away from that now to just using server side rendering (with hydration). Static site generation works fine on smaller websites but gets really slow as the site grows.
I know it's probably not universally the best approach, but I think that with sensible blocks for content and Incremental Static Regeneration, even sites with many many pages can be statically generated very quickly.
