Not a front-end dev, but I think (correct me if I'm wrong) the usual way of SSR were things like returning a plain HTML web page in Spring/ASP.NET/whatever and that the main invention of Next as far as SSR goes is that you can write your server's HTML docoment in JSX.

So I would say the author's point (if I was asked about it) would be that these other new front-end frameworks support similar things, instead of sending plain HTML over the wire.

Am I wrong?