I think you miss the point of having Next.js being based on React. Although I think handlebars/htmlbars are great (I'm a big ember user), the cool thing about React is it's component based. So pretty much everything you mentioned above, replace BarsHtml to react components, you have Next. However, the react components though in my opinion is much better than handlebars. It is more powerful, more flexible and at the same time more disciplined.