It’s awful and I’m pretty sad that it seems the entire nodejs community has adopted next.js as standard. All projects I’ve been involved with use it and none of them use any SSR at all.
That's mostly because `create-react-app` was abandoned. There is no default project template for React SPA, so everyone just uses Next, even if they don't need SSR.
Add in tailwind and a router of choice (I love wouter) and you've got 90% of what you need to build most applications. Vite is so much simpler than webpack and the rest that came before, it's a tiny amount of work to do this.
A lot of things exist. But to become a go-to standard a good timing is required. Next.js was getting popular right at the time Facebook abandoned 'create-react-app' template, and many people adopted Next.js even if they didn't need SSR. Vite didn't exist back then.