I think create-react-app is much more beginner friendly. Fewer concepts to learn. Rolling your own or using script tags to begin with is also an option (see this course for an example: https://egghead.io/courses/the-beginner-s-guide-to-react)
And create-react-app would be all I would ever need except that SEO on single page apps that don't have data loaded upon load really sucks compared to server side rendered pages. Is there a way to build a site using create-react-app and enable server side rendering without implementing a whole other framework like Nextjs?
We used React Router's ssr process described here[1] on my last React project. It worked ok, but there's a bit of hoop-jumping to go through if your pages are populated by async data.