With CRA out of React's docs, the new project default is a rendering decision

Both starter commands are one line long and they buy very different amounts of building. `npm create vite@latest my-app -- --template react` hands over a build tool that leans on the browser's own ES module support and compiles only the code you are currently looking at, so the dev server starts almost instantly no matter how large the project gets ^[5][10]. What it does not hand over is a router or a server. Those stay with you, and the dev.to piece names React Router as the sort of thing you now have to choose yourself ^[6]. `npx create-next-app@latest` hands over routing, data fetching and rendering with the decisions already made: routes are files, and any given page can be rendered on the server, generated at build time, or left to the client ^[8][9][10].

Line up the faults that piece pins on Create React App and the arithmetic is unflattering to the easy answer. Webpack-era dev server times ^[2] and the one-way `eject` cliff ^[3] are both gone under Vite, whose config file the author calls simpler than what it replaces ^[15]. The third fault, shipping nothing but a client-rendered SPA ^[4], survives intact: Vite output is still an SPA that, by the same author's account, is harder for search engines to index without extra work ^[13]. Two of three ^[11]. So the description of Vite as CRA's spiritual successor is more literal than it was probably meant to be ^[14].

That is what makes the choice an architecture call rather than a taste call. Picking Vite is a bet that markup assembled in the browser is acceptable for what you are building, which is the case the piece makes for internal tools and simple dashboards, where it says Next.js is more architecture than the job needs ^[12]. Picking Next.js buys the rendering flexibility and bills you for it in learning curve: the caching, data fetching and routing conventions are the framework's, not plain React's ^[12].

Worth remembering which of the two is actually a React project. Vite is framework agnostic, serving Vue, Svelte and vanilla JavaScript as happily as React ^[7], and that neutrality is precisely why the React-shaped questions stay open in a Vite app. The old command answered them by default, badly and invisibly. Nothing answers them now except a decision, taken by whoever runs the installer, usually before anyone has decided whether the product needs to be indexed.