Used Astro for a pro bono project. Found it fantastic, well documented, provides solutions for the hard parts, gets out of the way for the easy parts. Documentation is well written, but I find I don't need it much because mostly it works how I would expect.
You lost me at React SSR. That is part of the complexity bs. React is a lib for mapping state to the DOM. There's no DOM on the server. So React on the server is 95% useless for that purpose and hence, overengineered to create a bit of HTML and send it down the wire.
I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.
Hono is a server-side framework like Express. So same way like you handle application state in most server-side multi-page web apps: You just fetch whatever you need from the DB per request.
"State management" really isn't that much of an issue on the server. Only on clients, when you need to map state changes to DOM updates.
I've heard good things, what would you say is the killer reasons to justify being the nodejs ecosystem vs something more purpose built for ssr like php?
