The Next.js App Router is not an incremental improvement to the Pages Router. It is a different mental model.
Components are Server Components by default. They run on the server, have no JavaScript bundle impact on the client, can access databases and secrets directly, and produce HTML without hydration overhead.
For SellTrove's storefront: product listing pages are Server Components querying DynamoDB directly. The client receives rendered HTML with no client-side data fetching. Time to first byte is faster. The JavaScript bundle is smaller.
The App Router is worth the learning curve. The performance characteristics for content-heavy applications are meaningfully better than the Pages Router equivalent.
— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2024