JSX compiles to jsx(“div”, props, children) function calls so you need a runtime (which can be small) to render that into strings.
At which point, who cares if you’re using react to do it? It’s a good zero dep implementation of a jsx fn.
Alternatively, you can use Astro with React components, which will render them using React-DOM, but save them as static HTML by default (you can still choose some components to be hydrated, though).
Next.js does usually have the runtime part, but I imagine it’s not too hard to disable (or you can strip all JS from the output). Astro, like I mentioned, strips JS by default (from island components, not from .astro components, though you can usually use those without any client-side JS, too).
It is kinda roundabout way of generating HTML from JSX though.