ASP.NET Core 3.1 with React - Server Side Rendering / Pre-rendering - two web services required?

After spending some time researching, that are the current options:

• Live on .NET Core 3.1 with the NodeServices with an obsolete flag
• Create separate projects for back-end (asp.net) and front-end (node.js)
• Fork/copy NodeServices and maintain by myself
• Hope that a there will be a community driven fork of the NodeServices in the comming months before .NET 5 release were it will be removed eventually

I came across exactly the same problem. It took me a few weeks to create a new set up where frontend is separate from the backend.

I published the prepared boilerplate on GitHub and wrote a blog posts that explains how to enable server-side rendering with ASP.NET Core and React in details. The solution is a combination of CRA (Create React App), Storybook for CRA and a standard ASP.NET Core MVC template.

To make a long story short I built my custom asp-prerender-module and asp-prerender-data attributes. They communicate with an Express server based on Node.js to get the rendered HTML. Thereafter the HTML served to the browser gets "hydrated" with actions.