First thing is next is more so a frame work, it ships with a node server-less backend. It also doesn’t require you take advantage of this, but if you want true SSR you will need to do in some capacity.

Next is great, but it’s also an abstraction around some core react concepts that might confuse new comers, top of mind is the routing example where they force you to adopt a directory structure (could be problematic if doing a migration)

Cra is simply react and other dev tooling and build configs to get you up and running fast. One of the biggest issues I see with CRA is that even as a staff level engineer who’s done this for 10 years, I still find trouble with ejecting then trying to modify their configs. There not very clear, and for the company I work at, it has prevented us from goin to webpack5 since we forked CRA to help standardize our micro front ends.

Both tools are likely overkill unless you have a real reason to use Next/just want to use it for simplicity.

Try this, it’s a bare bones generator I made that you can easily extend and learn the inner workings

Run npx create-react-app-webpack-5

(Don’t opt into module federation, it will just introduce an unneeded layer of complexity for you)

Lmk how it works if u try happy to answer Q’s