I would first ask what you expect your frontend to do. Will your UI get live updates? What do you expect will be an average session time, minutes or hours?
I forgot to elaborate why. My point being you might get what you need from fairly static HTML generated by a backend, with a sprinkling of JavaScript for interactivity (Progressive enhancement, gov.uk has more on that as an approach )
I would first ask what you expect your frontend to do. Will your UI get live updates? What do you expect will be an average session time, minutes or hours?
I “just” want to build a pretty standard, responsive, modern-looking UI.
You can accomplish that with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development can be a good place to start.
Ideally without too much boilerplate
What is considered boilerplate, and too much of it, is a bit subjective.
in a framework that “feels good”
That is very much subjective. Also, you might not need a framework.
in a way that might at some point attract other contributors as well
Now you’re considering your own tastes, as well as the tastes of an unknown future stranger :D I’d say don’t worry about it.
Counterpoint, what if you don’t end up doing or needing that? Then you’ve paid the cost of complexity and added maintenance burden to update dependencies for no reason.
If you do end up needing a complex feature, perhaps the complexity can be isolated to just the part of your application that needs it? For example React can be used to render just parts of one page.
For mobile apps, perhaps all you need can be accomplished as a progressive web app (which is “just” regular HTML, CSS and JS at the end of the day)? That way you don’t have to deal with or pay for app store distribution.