A couple of weeks ago I tried the official Angular tutorial on SSR and found it super difficult. If you're willing to give React a try I would choose Next.js. It's pretty much a Node.js web framework that uses React for its views and has SSR out of the box. It has client side routing, so smooth page transitions, it was also fairly use to style the app with good ol css or sass. Ping me if you have any questions.
Oh I forgot to mention: if you're doing this just so you could learn modern JS then rolling your own solution is all fine. Other than that I would avoid this at all costs.
