When the shiny Next.js façade is literally strapped onto a PHP core

Description

Photo meme: A man in a black t-shirt sits on a beige couch, bottle-feeding a baby. His real face is obscured by a tablet that’s been awkwardly tied to his head with a plush, flesh-colored strap. On the tablet screen is a blurred video-call face. Bright yellow text above the man reads “PHP.” Black text on the tablet reads “next js,” and black text on the infant’s torso reads “react devs.” The visual gag: PHP (the unseen backend) wears a Next.js ‘mask,’ nurturing React developers like helpless infants - highlighting how legacy stacks often hide behind fashionable frameworks to placate the modern front-end crowd

Common Tags

React NextjsPages Javascript FrameworkFatigue BackendVsFrontend ModernTechStack WebDevelopment

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Nothing says ‘progress’ like strapping a statically rendered SPA onto a decade-old monolith and calling it a micro-frontend strategy

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Nothing says ‘progress’ like strapping a statically rendered SPA onto a decade-old monolith and calling it a micro-frontend strategy
Anonymous

After 15 years of defending PHP's honor in architecture reviews, you finally convince the team to migrate to Next.js, only to discover you've traded '$_POST' confusion for an endless debate about whether to use app router or pages router, while your Kubernetes cluster silently weeps at the 500MB Docker images
Anonymous

This perfectly captures the irony of React developers evangelizing 'modern' web development while Next.js abstracts away half of what they claim to understand, all built on the shoulders of PHP - the language they mock but which still powers more of the internet than they'd care to admit. It's the circle of life: today's cutting-edge framework is tomorrow's 'legacy system' that some new framework will be built to replace, while the baby React devs remain blissfully unaware that their entire ecosystem exists because someone solved server-side rendering decades ago in PHP
Anonymous

Modern stack: PHP in a Next.js balaclava bottle‑feeding React devs SSR and routing - 2005 features, 2025 cloud bill
Anonymous

We escaped PHP templates, then Next.js strapped SSR back on, fed React devs hydration, and added a Vercel bill - innovation by renaming the same architecture
Anonymous

PHP dad: stable but verbose. Next.js mom: SSR superpowers. React baby: endlessly re-rendering for attention - classic hydration drama
@danylo1554 2y

SSR, hmm, tasty
@kandiesky 2y

I admire how many shitty ideas react devs have just so they can do things without learning javascript/a backend properly
1. valentyn 2y
  
  crr project on react + django. is it bad?
  
  @kandiesky 2y
  
  It's slow. Unless you're reaching a bottleneck it's ok, tho. And even then there are some ways to scale without rewriting it in Go/Rust or another performant language. React is really slow if you're using too many elements (giant table, ultra large list, sorting, etc) but if you're not using it for that it's ok.
  
  valentyn 2y
  
  memorization, virtualization, lazy. limiting request data, sorting filtering leaving for server side?. i may have a lot of users(more than 1k). any resources for optimizations?
@NaNmber 2y

For those who also wonder
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

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