I feel like this opinion is a bit stale, many companies use tools like NextJS, and it's as productive as Rails and not what I'd call "fat". The biggest issue some folks have are there's no standard ORM yet (maybe Prisma), but ORMs are not so critical with node or js based apps imho.
I do like how NextJS has done a good job of bridging the gap between SPAs and classical back-end apps (for example, file-based routing). My understanding (with limited experience) is that the deployment story is great for Vercel, and less so for other platforms (requiring you to own a lot of the build pipeline, which is one of the bigger pain points of modern JS)
It was done before ORM became en vogue using SQL and recordsets. When it got too hairy we'd just put an abstraction in place, similar to how many apps end up doing the same atop the ORM via service objects, etc.
