Great Article!!

Thanks for sharing. You can try Azure static web app https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/static-web-apps/ which fits in your scenarios. It's still in preview but you should try this. It's has good support for azure function and JS apps. You can deploy React and azure function at same time. Don't need to worry about CORS issue and creating separating resources for Azure functions.

I would suggest you to check out the ASP.NET Core for building REST APIs.

You can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/gzipper library to convert build file in .gz and .br in react.

Very well explained & Great Article!

Swagger is also great platform for API Design and Documentation. It is very easy to generate API spec.

This article may solves your problem: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/How-to-add-a-title-in-anchor-tag-using-jQuery#

You can check the Sails.js (https://sailsjs.com/) to create RestAPIs using MVC architecture. Also you can use Loopback (https://loopback.io/).

React and Redux are two separate libraries. React is used for building UI whereas Redux is a predictable state management library. In React you have state and props to manage components data. But if you are building big complex applications then yes you may need to use redux. Check the link https://redux.js.org/faq/general#when-should-i-use-redux

It's really good platform.