I've created the frontend of various apps by using React where I was fetching data from some REST API someone else had created.
Regarding Node I've only used it once, in that occasion I did not use any frontend framework just vanilla JS and jQuery, and I was doing server-side rendering of the pages.
Now I want to create a simple MERN application and I am not completely sure that I'm aware of all the choices regarding the combination of frontend and backend and which one should be used when. It would be really helpful if I could see a complete list of all the possible ways React and Node can be combined to create a full app.
If you are using front-end frameworks you use backend servers as an API. Like if you use React framework you use axios to handle http requests to your node js (express) server. But if you are using vanilla js, ejs and using server side rendering you can directly render views from your server. In case of react you can use next.js.