If you really want to, you can have a react app that is just static templates with no interactivity with a simple Node server that just called renderToString and all of a sudden react is just a backend templating framework. If you want to get really fancy you can then re-render specific components on the client side without re-rendering the entire page. You don't need NextJS to do this either, its very simple and straightforward and lets you use an entirely frontend toolchain to do everything.