No you do not need NextJS or any other server side JS for most of the projects. Let's not pretend SPA is dead. Most of you do not need server side rendering and all the complexity it brings.

Just use Vite. You can decide whether to add Tailwind etc later. React should be left bare bones, and it can recommend frameworks, not make them sound default.

    npm create vite@latest my-app -- --template react-ts

- React 19 broke CRA

- I griped about it loudly on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/acemarke.dev/post/3lggg6pk7g22o) and that started a long debate

- I filed an umbrella issue describing the specific breakage and recommending an actual official deprecation announcement (https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/17004)

- The React team finally took action to fix the CRA breakage, then wrote the blog post, updated the setup docs page, and redid the docs SEO to get Google to stop showing the legacy docs as a search result.

So, kudos to the React team for making meaningful changes here!

(It's not _exactly_ what I was hoping for, and I gave them some additional review feedback that they didn't include, but gotta give credit for the actual changes and steps forward!)

I don’t support React pushing a wholesale shift to NextJS as a starting point for every project, given it’s mostly directed by a single private company (Vercel) that have positioned themselves as the default deployment platform for NextJS apps, publish the documentation, and do not shy away from claiming it as their own.

It has become extremely difficult to distinguish between NextJS features that are community-driven vs profit-driven e.g. api route functions (putting your backend in your React project, so now you will pay them for compute) and NextJS image optimization (famously expensive, and NextJS literally throws warnings if you don’t use it).

Now they're recommending you use frameworks? That are presumably built on top of React?

So what is React exactly these days? Feels like it's a shadow DOM renderer that's become a defacto API?

Like, you could use a component written for one React based framework, in another React based framework, and it'll just work?

Does React still provide routing and/or state management? Or has that been devolved to frameworks?

Wait a minute, has React become the J2EE of front-end?

Here comes the controversial part: I feel all this sentiment against "frontend complexity" is essentially non-frontend developers wanting cool, highly interactive web apps for their backend and getting bummed when they discover it's hard, specialized work. It is, the browser is a beast, all the layers are backwards compatible and web apps are essentially i/o heavy programs responding to a huge number of async events, trying to render a complex state in response on millions of slightly incompatible platforms. There's no silver bullet for that: it's complex, and the complexity shows in the tooling. But if you don't need that complexity because you just need the browser's lower-interactivity presentation layer, nobody in the world forces you to write an SPA. The problems normally start when you want to "just add a comment section" to your content but then you don't want to reload the page and you discover that it becomes complex soon and writing SPAs comes at a cost.

Sorry for the rant.

My tendency is to have an easier life in the future. So I'd probably prefer not using an universal rendering framework like Next, Nuxt, SvelteKit or SolidStart in client side mode and just use the core SPA framework. In case of Vue, it's even easier (but without those QoL features Nuxt provides).

But TBH I'm not really happy with vite. It seems to be made with a big flagship SPA in mind. If you just want one page, or if you want to include some react in a plain website, it is overkill. It creates dozens of files with potentially hundreds of configuration options. I guess this is typical for the entire JS ecosystem. But sometimes I wish the stuff around React was simpler and more opinionated: Just throw the .tsx files in src, run reactc, and include the output script in your HTML. Maybe add a flag to watch for code changes / hot reload.

We have several React apps (created with CRA) to support, embedded deep inside ASP.NET Web Forms apps (its legacy all the way down).

We decided to switch from CRA to Vite. It has worked great so far.

I am happy to see these docs recommend Vite as an option for adding React to existing apps, because at the time this decision was made on my team, it wasn’t very clear what the correct path was for replacing CRA. I don’t think we could have as easily switched to a framework like Nextjs.

If you are in a similar situation, I would recommend Vite.

I think at work when the next project comes along I'll try and see if we can not do React anymore. I hear good things about Vue.

I really really hope Astro will not go because that's what I chose to invest in for a while now... but the fear is real.

And the first suggestion for this extra abstraction layer is NextJS, developed by a company with a vested interest to make it hard to run your app on anything else than their own service.

Seems to me that the time is ripe to disrupt frontend development yet again and introduce a simpler stack.

Edit:

Maybe it just stopped being a recommendation in the React Docs?

https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/pull/5487