NextJS does more than create-react-app, but you're not required to use all those extra features. You can use it to just escape the tedium of configuring JS tooling.
I spent 4 hours trying to figure out how to build a static nextjs website. I ended up giving up and switching to astro. You basically need to understand SSR to do static sites.
Vite is the closest thing we have to a Create React App successor. It does most of what CRA did in its heyday, while subsisting on far fewer dependencies. Run `npm create vite@latest` and just follow the CLI prompts.
someone told me about vite. ill try that out next. I switched to astro for a blog after giving up with nextjs, and it works pretty well for a blog. not sure about a front end app though.
You could build a blog with Vite and @mdx-js/react, but that honestly might be overkill. Astro is definitely tailored towards the blog use case. Gatsby is another older framework that's oriented more towards building a blog, but I'm not a huge fan of how it insists on making you use GraphQL. Eleventy is another popular choice for JS powered static sites if you're not set on using React.
I’ve used gatsby before and it’s clunky and not well supported any more.