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.
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.