I’ve been saying this for a long time. It takes very little effort to spin up a react app so there’s little point in starting a project without it or whatever front-end framework you prefer.
As I’ve become more senior I’ve realized that software devs have a tendency to fall for software “best practices” that sound good on paper but they don’t seem to question their practical validity. Separation of concerns, microservices, and pick the best tool for the job are all things I’ve ended up pushing back against.
In this particular case I’d say “pick the best tool for the job” is particularly relevant. Even though this advice is hard to argue against, I think it has a tendency to take developers down the path of unnecessary complexity. Pragmatically it’s usually best to pick a single tool that works decently well for 95% of your use cases instead of a bunch of different tools.
I agree, just use React from day one. The reality is that web pages are hardly ever perfectly static, and once there's any dynamic nature to it at all you need something like React or else you'll have a train wreck of JS DOM-manipulation calls before you know it. React is perfect. You just update your state and the page magically re-renders. It's a breeze.