But I've been doing this for a long time, and that's what everyone says. I've heard this argument at least 100 times when someone is trying to defend their decision to build something overcomplicated. The number of times they ended up actually being justified is so small that I'm very suspicious of this argument.
If you're not expecting to need fancy client side stuff, does next.js give you as good a server side development experience as Django/Rails/Laravel? At that point, it would seem worth it "just in case", as you suggest, but in the past when I looked at it, the SSR stuff still felt a little cobbled together and experimental. I would love to hear from someone with firsthand experience switching, though!
I think Next has a great DevEx, but I'm just using it for some projects as a solo dev without a ton of traffic so perhaps there's some rough corners I haven't experienced yet.
I do think they are going down some risky paths where they do things like rewrite your code files depending on whether you're on server or client, and in general with "framework-defined infrastructure" where if you write certain functions the framework "knows" that it's supposed to be on the server or in a background job or whatever. But so far I've gotten the benefits without the drawbacks, though I might be jynxing myself.
I actually somewhat knew React before this project but besides not wanting to overcomplicate things I was hesitant because I didn't like pure client-side rendering. Then I learned NextJS makes it easy to mix/match client-side rendering and server-side rendering so I just switched to that.
So now, even for a simple website, I'll probably start with React because I don't want to dig myself into a needless hole.
I wrote about the experience here:
https://www.billprin.com/articles/why-i-ditched-django-for-n...
And yes that post upset some people who thought I should use htmx, but React is actually pretty easy and simple. Now most of my websites are React because I know it so it's easy and simple to use what you're used to.
Also, "I did it in React because that's the way it's done" isn't the worst reason because you benefit from that popularity, e.g. some library you need will have clear examples of integrating with React.
I think the frontend and JS community have certainly gone off some crazy rails at points, but I also think there's a popular sentiment on HN exaggerating how off-the-rails things have gone, usually expressed by people who don't actually develop many modern-looking websites. Most of the trends have gotten popular for somewhat rational reasons, and even that stuff that has gotten a little crazy like an explosion in dependencies, is really just about tradeoffs e.g. lots of dependencies cause lots of problems but also enable code re-use so it has pros and cons.