Exactly why I banned React from my pipelines years ago, native Web Components + dispatchEvent gives you the modern web without bloat and churn, and Vite for a lightweight HMR thanks to native ES Modules. Server-side you can use jsdom to polyfill document, it supports Web Components too.
web components are terrible and should not be used for modern development with the exception of very nieche use cases that require sandboxing
Custom elements are web components, it's literally what the article is about