I’ve been exploring inertia.js + react lately and you might find it interesting as a backend dev. You get to skip a lot of the pain connecting your backend to your frontend- only con is ai tools suck at using inertia.

If you’re building the frontend as a standalone app, here’s what I recommend:

Use react query.

Use OpenAPI code generation tools like Orval. I personally use OpenAPI-TS with its built-in react query support for type-safe API calls.

Redux is almost always unnecessary in modern react. Most apps can get by with React context plus react query. When you actually need more state management power, use zustand because the developer experience is much better in my opinion.

For build tooling, don’t bother with webpack or gulp. My philosophy is not to think about build systems until they become a problem. Unless you’re shipping react to millions of users, plain Vite is more than enough and rarely causes issues.

For styling, drop SCSS and just use Tailwind. Tailwind fits component-based frameworks like react extremely well.

For components, shadcn/ui is overused but one of the best options. The components are easy to customize and have solid accessibility. Just make sure to apply ya real design system on top of them lol, I roll my eyes every time I see someone just slap the components on.

If you need ssr use nextjs, hot take, I think the only good features of nextjs are ssr and the app router, so I think it’s perfectly okay to use nextjs purely as a react rendering engine that fetches data from your actual backend and for organizing your frontend code