Try mvc-router, see here: https://github.com/wisercoder/mvc-router/tree/master/DemoApp...

React was originally meant to be the 'V' in MVC. You can still use it that way and React becomes very simple when you only use it for UI. Why do data fetching in a React component?

Rails 8 is surprisingly good nowadays. It absolutely still has its share of problems (e.g. Bundler being slow, the frontend story being crappy without Inertia, lack of types which is a biggie, memory) but it is still a fantastic framework imo.

The basic premise of Next is good, but it definitely has more overhead that in should, has odd "middleware", and is very hard to optimize. I view this mostly as a React problem though since any page requires full hydration and ships everything to the client. RSCs are... not my favorite for sure.

I too have been very frustrated by this, and I made an "Astro for dynamic sites" TypeScript framework called Hyperspan ( https://www.hyperspan.dev ) that aims to fill the gap in the JS ecosystem for a modern fully dynamic option that, similar to Astro, makes dynamic islands easy. I have enjoyed using it in all my own projects. Check it out if you want.

If Rails is considered a worse framework, then I'm pretty much speechless. Not everything has to be about performance. Security is a thing too.

It’s unbelievably terrible. I don’t understand its success at all, as much as I’ve tried.