From the LogRocket blog:
To understand the details of these metrics, read the Lighthouse Scoring Guide. One of the more notable differences for our purposes is the First Meaningful Paint.
CRA: 6.5s Next.js: 0.8s
Next.js might be a good thing to try out in a side project.
Lighthouse isn't everything. You also need to think about what works best for you as a developer or for your team.
There's also build tools like React Snap which help serve static assets however as I said a few weeks back it's a bit weird to configure.