Hono also has an official Vite devserver plugin if want an easy way to run a single integrated dev server locally for an API which also serves up your UI and has the hot reloading goodness you want.

I've used a very similar setup for a couple of new projects which were about to default to Next.js but didn't really specifically need what Next.js does (e.g. its SSR abstractions, these were internal, client-only apps sitting behind an auth redirect) from wasting their time fighting it.

Hono also supports JSX on the backend out of the box of you want to use components as a superior alternative to string templating libraries to serve up some HTML, a middle ground of sorts if Astro (:heart:) is too much for what your app needs to do.

I haven't needed to take advantage of this yet, but if you don't need full-fat React, it can also SSR and run on the client, sort of "vanilla JSX" if you will (sorry).