have you tried Nuxt.js

>This is because when Next.js loads the actual Server Component, no matter what, the entire page re-mounts. I was begging Next.js to just update the existing DOM and preserve state, but it just doesn't.

YES! YES! I FEEL SO SEEN RIGHT NOW! I find this behavior unbelievably frustrating. It's hard for me to understand why they ever even shipped RSC's without fixing this.

Our experience entirely. We replaced next.js with a simple router and everything in every sense got simpler, and FASTER. It was a remarkable education, replacing that crazy thing.

...or just not use server components :)

I have yet to reach the limits of doing a Vite create and installing react router myself for the several entirely client side apps we manage. It has sane build defaults and for whatever definition of ‘works’ is possible in JS, ‘just works’. If it becomes too complex for that basic setup it usually means we’ve over-complicated something.

Where we have a need for server side, nodejs just never felt natural for us so we stuck with java springboot or flask/fastapi as appropriate.

It feels like so much work has been done to just end up going full circle back to Django-style website applications. All of these frameworks have continually re-solved problems that were already solved in something other than Javascript, and then people write blogs about how they're surprised about it. It feels a bit uncanny to see.