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It’s generally recommended to use app router now.

its essentially a marketing website, featuring a lot of animations on the copy and assets.

I’m going with next for performance thanks to the SSG and out of the box optimizations

the need for interactivity and animation from the first screen means that it will pretty much have ‘use client’ from top to bottom of the component tree as far as I can tell

not exactly, you are talking about the first screen but you should think in term of a tree instead

the idea is that you keep everything an RSC if possible, and scope "use client" to interactive components

in real-life, sometimes you need "use client" immediately at the top of a page, that's totally ok, but sometimes you can move client components to the leave and getter a better arch

anyway, Next.js is a good choice here as you noticed thanks to build-time rendering + if possible RSC and the possibility to easily use React

you can use the App Router without any problem, the cool stuff it brings are route handlers

this is great for adding RSS feed as an "rss.xml" route, a sitemap etc.

you can do the same with "pages" but it's a tad more intuitive with the App Router

thanks for the detailed response @Eric Burel ! I figured there would be a way to postpone the use client tag until strictly necessary at the leaves, as you mention.

curiously enough, Ive managed to start building the app with gsap animations getting triggered from a useIsometricLayoutEffect hook. it checks typeof window to =useEffect on the server and =useLayoutEffect on the client.

strangely enough, I have not had to use the “use client” tag anywhere yet… could that be because of the hook? i thought i was going to be using client everywhere and now im thinking i can get away with no usage of it whatsoever 😂

The only problem you might run into if it has lots of animations. Specifically layout or page transitions. Unfortunately in app router it is not possible to properly have an animated page transitions due to not being able to use an exit animation

To my knowledge this is pretty much the only relevant reason to use pages router. But if it’s not important to you then I’d recommend app router all the way

Im going with pages for now. I dont foresee any routing, so I guess thats a bullet dodged with page transitions out of the question