I have been tempted to go back to turn of the century tech: html tables for layout with inline css for styling and smarty template for separation of concerns all driven by php.
> html tables for layout with inline css for styling
Html and css have only been getting better over the past two decades; they are not the problem; no need to resort to inline styles and tables. As for going back to server-side templating with php, this is a very good option.
Make sense, but the lack of an "oficial" solution doesn't help https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project