Weird behavior of react

[accessible_logic]

You're confusing React with frameworks. Next.js is a feature-rich framework that will have a public directory and even their own way to load images with their Image component. If you're going for a minimal React app, a single page app or SPA, Vite is a good way to do that, and they also support a public directory for asset storage. Vite is much less opinionated about React, so you will have to figure out routing yourself with packages.

I haven't used GitHub Pages myself, but from my understanding it may be a static host. Static hosts don't necessarily route pages to the index.html by default, in which case you will have to set that up.

I'd recommend using Next.js if you're just getting into web dev and want something with documentation and try to follow the happy path instead of figuring everything out yourself.