> I don’t see enough value in the added complexity and the increasingly complicated API surface.
This very much. For my own work and personal projects, the pages router has been more than enough.
In terms of the complicated API surface and the difficulty to grasp newer concepts introduced with the app router, it continuously reminds me a couple lines of the Zen of Python[0]:
> If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
> If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
[0]
https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/