The #1 advice I can give you is ditch React and other front-end frameworks. Many kinds of complexity in software multiply instead of add. Hate fighting with pip or mvn? It’s at least twice as bad if you are developing two systems instead of one. (It is how Googliness infests the rest of the web…. They can afford to pay 10 freshers $200k a year to develop an app they will kill shortly afterwards, but you can’t.)
The strange thing is that old-school web apps built like it was 1999 are faster and better for the users in most ways. Sure, people put more effort into choosing fonts for reddit as opposed to HN, but HN is so much faster I can’t see how anybody can wait for reddit to load, never mind wait to log in and post.
Old school web apps do require you to have a systematic strategy for handling things that html doesn’t do by itself. You need a single function that draws a <select> with the <options> filled out. Proper error handling requires a systematic way to fill the old form values into the controls when you draw them. That’s about it.
The one disadvantage of old school apps is there is no support for transition animations or loading spinners but your app might be so fast it doesn’t need to display spinners. If you want to have some animation and the ability to make dropdowns automatically send an AJAX request see htmlx.
