Hey Jon. In my opinion there should be two versions of the homepage - one for guests and one for registered users.
The two example images you provided look more like what a business would use for its online presence and in my opinion it looks off. This website is well established, so I think you can do something that looks more like what stackoverflow currently has:
SO Guest homepage: A statement of what the site is for with data counts below (user count, question count, solution count, etc.). And then the business-related stuff, like the services they charge for, their clients, etc.
SO User homepage: A searchable list of questions the user might be interested in, community questions, blog posts and a few tools.
I'm not up to date about what you may want to do with the site or what plans you have. Perhaps you want to add a marketplace, where a user can pay for a solution, hire a developer or even find a third party tool. I also don't know if that already is in production, but whatever the plan is, the homepage should reflect it. If the plan is to convince guests to join the community, then a few ideas come to me:
AP Guest homepage: A statement of what the site is for with data counts below, just like stack overflow, but also add testimonials of success stories and similar data, people love those. The call to actions buttons could be "Join for free" and "Browse topics". You could even add another pair of buttons like "I want to get help" and "I want to search".
AP User homepage: A searchable list of topics the user might be interested in, again, just like stack overflow, but with a few tweaks, maybe the newest topics in forums the user likes to browse.
As for your journey in React, perhaps NextJS is the right choice for the homepage, since it's rendered server-side and react is rendered client-side, which is bad for SEO and it will have hiccups to appear on google.