The full story behind moving a 100K-visitor site off Next.js to Express and EJS: the bugs that started it, the research that held up, and the tradeoffs.

Next.js has 55 known CVEs to Express’s 5, same source, same date. Two are as severe as it gets. Here’s what the gap actually shows, and why it exists.

Server-rendered templates compile just-in-time, with no separate build phase. Why EJS never needs a bundler, and when a build step still makes sense.

Redis exposes real hit/miss metrics natively. Next.js’s caching layer doesn’t, for self-hosted deployments. Here’s what that observability gap actually costs.

React’s SSR APIs run synchronous CPU work on Node’s single thread, from renderToString to RSC serialization. What actually blocks, and why templating doesn’t.

Alpine.js ships at roughly 7kB versus a typical React bundle near 130kB. The scoped case for Alpine.js on content sites, and when a framework still makes sense.