Then again I'm one of those few engineers who actually enjoys CSS so my opinion may not be representative.
If you want something less flexible, more opinionated, restricted to rendering in DOM but with more respective batteries included (such as styling, etc.), you should look at a framework instead. Some popular examples are Gatsby, Next, Docusaurus, etc. (Non-React alternatives in the same category include Vue and Svelte.)
And it's not hard to get them working in Webpack...if you're like me.. maintaining the same app for 10 years and see no reason to switch to the new hotness.
Why does react makes this the developer’s problem to figure out? It feels a bit like a missed opportunity.
For a long time React was advertised and regarded as "just a UI library", so not having anything bundled with it was a conscious design decision.
End result is that you have an average of three popular solutions for stuff that's normally already included in other frameworks and no two React projects are the same.