It might be easier to staff for. But developing a React frontend takes way more time than just server rendering HTML and layering in JS for the vast majority of use cases.
I'm speaking from experience on a pretty wide variety of commercial web projects. Been building websites for twenty years. Frankly, it's not even a close competition. What I've found is that a lot of teams don't even track their time, so it's likely many developers don't realize how large the React penalty is. I would encourage devs to spike on both approaches and do a thorough accounting of their time.
