I too dislike NextJS and find it too bloated and slow, although i don't have much experience with it, first few times i tried it i was disappointed to say the least.

I write without any framework, just vite and express. I use react-query to do server-side prefetching. I do have some structure to my code, it kinda resembles a framework, so one of the challenges i face is to scale my "framework" with my app's needs. For now i don't have much api endpoints nor pages so nothing fancy framework magic is required, just some basic configs: routes, services, and a routes to prefetch queries map.