React (and Vue, et al) was built with client side rendering in mind. It just does not seem to fit the server side rendering pattern.
What are the use cases? From my perspective, if your app is a rich web app with a lot of interactivity, you probably want CSR and don’t benefit much from SSR.
If you have a content-centric site, or a site with some interactivity but not much, you want a static site generator, or SSR. But in that case, a template engine with some smaller client side libraries (jQuery or AlpineJS or idk what all is out there).
Using React SSR for all of these seems like the wrong tool. What am I missing?
By my understanding on the matter, it depends on use case. Ecommerce websites benefit greatly from SSR due to the fact that they want to be able to show content as quickly as possible so the user have something to interact with. It also improves SEO.
Well that’s why you would render on the server, not why you would use React to do it instead of the many, many server side frameworks
Oh, I just realized I completely misunderstood your post.
But then you’d be sacrificing all that comes with React. Unless you mean having the page rendered by another framework and having React components loaded later, but I’d think that would be less maintainable than if the whole thing was just in React.