[tony]

Chakra UI is a widget toolkit, so it's not on the same level of comparison.

React will use JSX and can use all the cool new JS stuff, e.g. module imports, template literals. With webpack there's automated code splitting. The toolchain is under very active development (from react, to webpack, to babel, to new dependencies I've never heard of - aside: a downside is the dependency graph in node can be crazy)

If your site is simple enough, server site templates will do. For anything non-trivial, where there's a lot of reusability and its very async / API heavy, the benefits shift dramatically to including a frontend framework.

Regarding server side templates, there's limitations to how far templates engines (e.g. django templates / jinja2) can take you. Extending templates works when done carefully, as does overriding blocks. Anything non-trivial becomes very hard to manage - there's no type safety, setting variables is burdensome.

On parataxic, there's no server. It's all static files served from cloudfront via Gatsby (to get an idea of this: https://jamstack.org/)