Longer: React became standard because people with actual no frontend knowledge (and taste) wanted to have building blocks, doesn't matter how bad, ugly and slow it is.
Next.js is hyped, because it does many things quickly (and dirty), a low learning curve. It does what PHP did 10+ years ago, and since so many new devs are in the market, for them, this is a new thing (you know, every joke is new for a new born...).
Next.js is pretty much just used as a baseline to load shadcn blocks/components, have a routing that does not require a backend, then push everything to be static (No, I won't mention that, if you can write decent vanilla JS code, how much faster, safer, efficient code you can write instead of that monstrocity).
How many bad startup companies are on the market (3-8-year-old companies that still state it is a startups and still looking for funding, without an actual user base) they tend to have "opinionated" leaders who basically have always some friend who recommend things that is pretty much just hype-train decision without actual experience or understanding the consequences.
Many companies burn hundreds if not thousands of dollars on infrastructure to fire up Next.js. And if you check all the features that are stated for it and compare it with 5-10 years old PHP solutions, you will realize, you can run the same product on a monthly 5 dollar vps too... (unpopular truth)
In our case, we had started a large project with Vue because most of our small team was familiar with it, but our tech lead decided to pivot to React because we had so much trouble hiring for Vue development in our city.