Without the context of what is being built the answers are useless.<p>A blog or shopping cart, in react would be worthless. You would have this massive up front page load while all the JS downloads that provides little benefit... you would just be stepping on your own toes for a shot a customer capture.<p>If you were building an app that was an interactive client for exploring some data set, react would be a great choice for that... Capture happened long before react was loaded and your looking for an optimal UI and minimal data over the wire...
Personally I would start with whatever backend framework you like (Django, Laravel, Rails, etc) and use HTMX. But if you know your application is going to have a lot of complex client side state (like Google Maps) then I would pick React.
If you want just something pretty and useful without toolchain hell:<p>Check out Bulma. (<a href="https://bulma.io/" rel="nofollow">https://bulma.io/</a>)