Sure, but it's not an either/or situation. Every big project adds dependencies, but using Next means you have some basic, common functionality included out of the box by default/by convention (like TypeScript, linting, testing, routing, caching, SSR, static builds, serverless definitions, etc.) all done in a predefined way. Maybe your project has 200 deps, but Next would replace like 50 of the big ones that you'd otherwise have to separately install and maintain. Just having a basic page/app router and minimal state system (via contexts and RSC and props and such) reduces a lot of the headaches of the bad old React Router days.

It replaces "React soup of the day" with a more standard "recipe" shared by most Next projects – like "Grandma Vercel's secret React minestrone", I guess. But yes, projects would typically still add their own "spices" on top of those basics.