[aswerty]

My 2 cents

The SSR game is peak frontend fashion.

The players in this space sell hosting solutions and getting you onto their platform and spending money is their primary goal (i.e. increasing the amount of server side compute and ancillary "services" needed to deliver a frontend solution). Regardless even if you go SSR the backend elements should just be used for SSR, and potentially things like auth, but otherwise just go with a data API as normal that provides the SSR backend with data. Rule of thumb, the SSR solution should never be considered "backend" even if it is running on a server and not the client.

SSR means it is way more difficult to open the network tab in developer tools and understand how your frontend is driving your API. I don't think I fully appreciated looking at the JSON sent over the wire in this tab until I did some SSR work.

If you go with SSR expect ridiculous churn in your technology space.

In the end I have latched onto vanilla React (e.g. no framework like Next) SPA that lazy loads components so you don't have a huge download on the first page load. I use wouter for routing and am pretty much trying to minimize all other deps where possible. I've gone with Preact but am questioning that a little now since it feels like I'm going off-road a bit on my simple setup.

I'm no expert on the frontend but thought I'd share my experience walking down this same path over the last 3 months or so.

Edit: how ironic that I'm calling React "my simple setup"...