> could be a simple SSR site, but frontend devs don't like writing anything but SPAs
It might be worth asking why that is.
I used to write a ton of SSR'ed pages back when that was really the only option we had (before people introduced jQuery and AJAX), then I wrote SPAs (mostly Angular & React), then again SSR'ed websites (Java/Spring/JSP with a ton of more-or-less vanilla JavaScript) and now I've been on a Vue-based stack (w/ Astro/Vite for SSR) for a number of years. And these were all applications with dozens of teams working on them in parallel and a corresponding number of components & LoC.
Personally, I wouldn't want to go back to traditional SSR stacks (Spring/JSP, vanilla PHP, or Python w/ Django or Flask) ever. People often vastly underestimate the complexity of good UIs. They might start simple ("could be a simple SSR site", as you say) and, before long, the wheels come off the bus and they look at a big unmaintainable ball of vanilla JS on top of HTML templates that are directly coupled to the database schema, with global CSS styles permeating (infecting) the entire code base.
In my experience, there is a certain amount complexity that is inherent to a good UI. It doesn't matter whether you use classic SSR, or modern frontend frameworks like Angular/React/Vue/Svelte/SolidJS, or new kids on the block like HTMX/Turbo/… — that complexity will still be there. However, with modern frameworks you've at least got a chance to tame that beast.
More specifically, what modern frontend frameworks give us is: 1) Modularization into components, 2) scoping of styles, 3) type-safety, 4) unit-testability of components, 5) component-local state management (≠ insanities like Redux), 6) clear separation between view/UI logic and business logic.
If you can replicate these features using a bespoke version of JSP or HTMX or whatever, great! But if you can't, I'd personally rather pick a well-established frontend framework like React or Vue. Yes, your developers might still mess that up and produce shitty code, but the chances of them messing up in a classic SSR stack (without the aforementioned features) are so much greater.