Vite is your best friend
The NextJS team recently came out with Turbopack, their Rust based solution for replacing Webpack. While this led to a Rails-like upgrade path for developers, providing trust that they can just bump their framework version, and things will work.
That easy upgrade came with a price though; a proprietary tool, that isn't necessarily extensible by teams, and locks you into an ecosystem.
Why didn't Vercel use Vite?
Evan You touched on this in a podcast (link timestamped) essentially Vercel wanted an easy upgrade path, however the Vite team did have a proof-of-concept put together for them.