A week building an image SaaS on Cloudflare Workers produced nine failures. In the five shown in code, two come from the TanStack Start plugin's build behaviour and three from React timing and captcha logic that follow the code anywhere.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives35
- Confidence58
One line of middleware mapped the unprefixed English locale onto a dynamic route, and every path it rewrote answered with no-store while the nine prefixed locales kept s-maxage=300. The only signal was in the headers.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption28
- Hype gap−6
- Incentives42
- Confidence57
A fan site ships nine languages as static HTML with English on bare root URLs. The stated reason is per-request Worker billing, and the arithmetic behind that reason is wrong.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption12
- Hype gap+46
- Incentives38
- Confidence58
A wallpaper site's post-mortem on serving 70,000-plus 4K masters through Next.js 15 shows the optimizer failing on Referer checks and edge CPU ceilings, not on throughput.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives68
- Confidence44
A dev.to build log mirrors a public REST API into static JSON and ships it to Cloudflare's edge. The failure mode disappears; the request count and the staleness question do not.
Reality
- Evidence44
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives52
- Confidence46