It doesn't matter!
If I'm building a personal project, I don't have the same time to curate a full ecosystem stack and nobody in the react system is maintaining those for applications that are put to the side for weeks or months at a time.
As for me, I just restarted a personal project on rails because of its batteries included mentality - it means I can limit the number of dependencies, and they have gotten very good at migration paths and deprecations.
https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/Gemfile.lock
Just a playful comment - not challenging your experience
In contrast, I have work apps made in React that need regular piecemeal updating — routers, form libraries, query managers, CSS — because we’ve chosen to cobble that together ourselves. That’s fine, that’s the path we chose knowingly when we picked the tech we picked, but the point isn’t that frameworks don’t have dependencies — it’s that they take on more of the burden of managing them for you.
I'd say Clojure and java ecosystem is miles ahead of rails as well, but for this project I don't want to play in that garden.
It replaces "React soup of the day" with a more standard "recipe" shared by most Next projects – like "Grandma Vercel's secret React minestrone", I guess. But yes, projects would typically still add their own "spices" on top of those basics.