I've used plain react for a few things in the past few years. I strongly prefer it to next/nuxt/all this other stuff. Preact and an understanding of best practices can make it fairly performant with a more or less drop-in replacement if you're willing to sacrifice compatibility with absolutely all the ecosystem.

I still prefer svelte but it's less mature and universally-known. React is still a pretty good choice if you need something that will more or less work and that anyone can write.