I would recommend not to setup Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors. This is incidental complexity. You want to write and deliver website, right? All this has nothing to your initial goal. For example, you can take CRA and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Or you can take parcel and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Convention over configuration.
Back to original answer.
You want to use Next.js if you want to do SSR e.g. you have highly dynamic content and there is no way to do it statically
You want to use Gatsby if you have mostly static website, like blog. Drawback you need to understand GraphQL
Create-react-app ideal starter for beginners, good defaults. But you will not be able to do SSR, you still can do prerendering with react-snap.
You want to use react-static for static websites and you don't want to deal with GraphQL.
I would recommend not to setup Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors. This is incidental complexity. You want to write and deliver website, right? All this has nothing to your initial goal. For example, you can take CRA and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Or you can take parcel and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Convention over configuration.
Back to original answer.
A bit more here dev.to/stereobooster/server-side-r...