Heard and appreciate the feedback. We’re well aware of the DX papercuts in Middleware. With 15.5 we made a big step in supporting Node runtime[1] which addresses a slew of issues people have reported over time.
If I went back in time, I would have called it Routing Middleware or Routing Handler. A specific hook to intercept during the routing phase, which can be delivered to the CDN edge for specialized providers. It’s also a somewhat advanced escape hatch.
Since OP mentions logging, it’s worth noting that for instrumentation and observability we’ve embraced OpenTelemetry and have an instrumentation.ts convention[2]
[1] https://nextjs.org/blog/next-15-5#nodejs-middleware-stable
[2] https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/file-conventions/i...
https://vercel.com/changelog/cve-2025-55182
> Cloudflare WAF proactively protects against React vulnerability
https://blog.cloudflare.com/waf-rules-react-vulnerability/
We still strongly recommend everyone to upgrade their Next, React, and other React meta-frameworks (peer)dependencies immediately.