I am an instructor on some topics about software development, and when I lecture courses about reactjs I start by explaining that I do not consider reactjs a framework, but I library. I know that there is a not very linear definition of what a framework is, but what I mean is, reactjs is not the traditional opinative framework with a lot of decisions made for us, out of the box. The example I usually mention is that reactjs does not contain a routing system out of the box as angular, for example. It also does not force a styling mechanism. Reactjs is mainly concerned with the control flow of the front end, or if we prefer view layer, that integrates well with external renderers (e.g. react-dom, react-native).
That in conjunction with great popularity of reactjs and its big community leads to great opportunities for higher level frameworks to appear. NextJs is one of those frameworks that use reactjs, which I have been following for 2-3 years and has impressed me.
Nextjs is not a fit all solution for sure, but it tries to build the better solution for a web application, depending the specific case. You could need a server rendering side page, a pre rendered page or a client rendering side page. For each case Nextjs tries to understand what is the best solution. Well handled, this could lead to big improvement on the first contentful paint metric.
With that, Nextjs reduces a lot of the decision fatigue developers could be confronted with, allowing us to think on the real product.
Nextjs is even working directly with Google to improve Performnace, and more recently with react core team about server components.
Nextjs is looking for commerce and cms solutions, and is created by Vercel company which is a cloud provider where we could deploy our Nextjs application and others, and even preview our developments. Recently, Vercel secured a 40 millions investment. So, it seems to be havef a great future ahead.
To end, NextJs is more aware of the frontend, but other frameworks are appearing around it, to extend it to databases and cloud storeages, for example. One example of this is Blitzjs, a fullstack react framework.
Here we have a youtube video with a nice overview of NextJs.
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