Anyway though, Astro is lovely, especially for static site generation.
The biggest problem is that React itself recommends against using Vanilla React.
https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app
> If you want to build a new app or website with React, we recommend starting with a framework.
This, frankly, is insane. The whole point of React was that it was this relatively lightweight UI library you could drop into pretty much any workflow.
The fact that the React docs themselves recommend against using the React library as a library is just mind boggling but also another instance in the long history of React devs being absolutely hostile to their users.
But Next.js is not the only option on the market, so I partially echo your sentiment, not around React SPA vs React fullstack, but around Next.js vs a half dozen better alternatives for the React ecosystem.
I agree, but you can definitely do this without SSR or Next.JS. Common examples are tRPC, Zodios, or even just plain fetch calls with shared type definitions.
You don't need a framework for that.
import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react'
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [react()],
Besides the standard parts IIRC next.js has stuff for image & font optimization and more.
I really dislike next.js, but saying express is an alternative for most next.js apps is not true.