Thanks for the comment 🙂.

You don't need a framework, or a toolkit, or even React to create web applications. The reason we use these tools is so that we can focus on our business case, and not spend time re-inventing the wheel.

You are 100% correct. It's possible to build your own static site generator for your React app, or to setup your own server-side rendering, but the more time you spend on this, the less time you spend actually building your product and delivering features.

Using NextJS gives us a lot of features right out of the gate, and HappyKit adds a few more features (authentication, analytics and feature flags).

Maybe here's a good analogy: let's say you work for a company, and that company has a paid subscription to zoom and slack. There are many free open source alternatives to zoom and slack out there. However, setting up these tools costs time, and if your business is building e-commerce tools for selling widgets, setting up your own slack / zoom alternative is not a good use of your time.