Honestly, I've had a great experience because I've read a lot of experiences like yours and stuck with pages router & Next 12, which works nicely for everything I've needed it to do.
There might be a point where app router is stable & smooth but it's pretty clearly not right now, so havn't really seen the need to upgrade. I think there was a pretty decent comms issue with the stability of it from both the Next and React teams, but I have a hard time faulting an otherwise fairly stable and useful framework for adding features when they're not breaking the existing stable path.
Hooks was a bit of a bumpy transition as well, but I do think that I prefer the code written with them to the code before them. I think it's OK to wait a year or two to let the rough edges get filed down when these types of frameworks release big new feature sets.
Edit: I'll note that we don't use next/image or API routes either, both of which I've seen some churn / pain with. Possible I just hit on the framework when it was in a pretty happy place and most of the new features or suggested defaults have had pain points that I havn't experienced.
There might be a point where app router is stable & smooth but it's pretty clearly not right now, so havn't really seen the need to upgrade. I think there was a pretty decent comms issue with the stability of it from both the Next and React teams, but I have a hard time faulting an otherwise fairly stable and useful framework for adding features when they're not breaking the existing stable path.
Hooks was a bit of a bumpy transition as well, but I do think that I prefer the code written with them to the code before them. I think it's OK to wait a year or two to let the rough edges get filed down when these types of frameworks release big new feature sets.
Edit: I'll note that we don't use next/image or API routes either, both of which I've seen some churn / pain with. Possible I just hit on the framework when it was in a pretty happy place and most of the new features or suggested defaults have had pain points that I havn't experienced.