Much of the official documentation now refers to server components as the "right" way to do certain things. Cra is end of life, with the replacement nextjs being heavily biased towards server components.
Your tooling certainly has changed in that you won't use cra any more, and I wouldn't agree that this direction does not detriment previous use cases.
I'd already switched to vite due to the lack of customization that one has with CRA.Even if create-react-app was still maintained, I'd never go back to it.
I view create-vite-app with React presets as the spiritual successor of create-react-app, rather than NextJS.