CRA was never a fully official project, though there was a lot of confusion around that. It was in a weird semi-official state, it certainly had the endorsement of the React team initially but it didn't have actual resources from Meta behind it.
CRA was useful when it first appeared because the whole space was a big mess. But it very quickly outlived its usefulness, and its approach was really problematic in my opinion. The config was too complex to eject and modify compared to what you could do yourself with Webpack directly.
> CRA was useful when it first appeared because the whole space was a big mess. But it very quickly outlived its usefulness, and its approach was really problematic in my opinion. The config was too complex to eject and modify compared to what you could do yourself with Webpack directly.
Yes agree, but writing and marinating config for multiple projects just don`t scale. Not to mention we need something dirty and fast.
my 2c: still does the job without ejecting on my small project. Just reading your comment made me happy I don’t spend time thinking about webpack configuration
Until you run into any problem that you need to debug with the build process. And there are more problems today because CRA is not maintained well now.
The tools got much better, it's much easier to just set up a basic Webpack or Vite setup today compared to when CRA was originally created. And the simple configs are much simpler to debug and understand when something doesn't work as expected.
CRA was useful when it first appeared because the whole space was a big mess. But it very quickly outlived its usefulness, and its approach was really problematic in my opinion. The config was too complex to eject and modify compared to what you could do yourself with Webpack directly.