[_bxg1]

Hybrid client/server React is a monstrosity that does provide a genuinely compelling set of benefits. Next.js neatly wraps up this monstrosity so you can at least try to pretend it doesn't exist.

Server-side-only React sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of what purpose React actually serves.

In React, you write functions that accept data and output what amounts to HTML. Thing is, you can easily do this with a plain template string. You're just dropping values into HTML. The only benefit provided by React is the efficient modification of existing DOM to bring it up to date with the new state, without dropping the whole thing and rebuilding it from scratch. If there is no existing DOM - because you're only making one rendering pass - React serves no purpose at all.

Here's my website. It uses virtually nothing except Express and a Markdown parser. Pages and components are rendered from plain JavaScript functions. Blog posts are in markdown and automatically detected. Right now it statically renders all of the pages on startup, for efficiency, but it could be made dynamically-rendered with a flip of a switch: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website