5 or so years ago, Next was a pretty solid option to quickly build up a non SPA, when combined with the static export function. It wasn't ideal, but it worked and came batteries included. Over time it's become more bloated, more complicated, and focused on features that benefit from Vercel's hosting – and static builds can't take advantage of them.
These newer features seem of limited benefit, to me, for even SPAs. Why is there still not a first class way of referencing API routes in the client code that provides typing? Once you reach even medium scale, it becomes a mess of inteprolated string paths and manually added shared response types.
As a side note, I'm slowly moving out of Next.js, as you said, is bloated, full of stuff that is just noise and that benefits them (more network requests more money) for little user benefit.
Right now for me the gold standard is Vite + Tanstack Router. (And Elysia for api/server, but thats unrelated).
There is a decent bit of history around that page and whether some things should go in a collapsible div and whether that was prioritizing certain frameworks over other ones.
One thing I'm still salty about is that CRA isn't mentioned anywhere (in the entire site). It's like it never existed.