[v8] Update Next.js support policy

[mydea]

We currently support Next.js 10+.

In v8, we may want to raise this.

Open questions

• Do we want to raise it? How much?

[mydea]

@lforst can you evaluate this when you find some time?

[lforst]

Some facts:

• The latest Next.js@10 version was released 3 years ago and has about 10k weekly downloads (I pulled this number during Christmas week so actual is probably 3-4x). For comparison, Next.js has about 5mil downloads on regular weeks.
• The latest Next.js@11 version was released 2 years ago and has about 10k weekly downloads (also pulled this number during Christmas so actual is likely 3-4x). The most used version I can spot has about 30k/wk.
• Next.js 11 came with webpack 5 support but still supports webpack 4
• Next.js 12 removed webpack 4 support

Dropping version 10 is a no-brainer in my opinion, but we don't gain a lot from it. Dropping version 11 is a bit more debatable but would allow us to drop webpack 4 support which will allow us to simplify build time logic and drastically reduce the complexity of our test infra.

No decision yet.

[lforst]

Update: We may have a plan to use @vercel/otel to instrument performance in Next.js. This would require us to bump the minimum Next.js version to at least 13.

[lforst]

I think I have settled on this topic. Because we will rely heavily on OpenTelemetry going forward, we should use the first Next.js version that also supports OTel.

I have found the following PR in the Next.js repository: vercel/next.js#46198, which adds some OTel instrumentation to Next.js. This change was first included in version 13.2.0 of Next.js.

Because of the above, I would vote that we make 13.2.0 the minimum version compatible with Next.js.

[mydea]

Sounds reasonable to me! But let's double check this with folks, to be on the safe side.

[AbhiPrasad]

Closing because we've picked 13.2.0 as per #11097