I was wondering if anyone has past experience and what is the best way to go about this?
Is react the best way to go?
There are many ways to write react. Take a solid boilerplate like react-boilerplate. Then bolt a good dashboard template on it. Get rid of crazy stuff (redux etc) Use Material. Write simple Functional components using hooks and tie everything together.
When you are rewriting, let go some stuff that you don't need.
Source: we are in the middle of what you want to do.