The irony of CRA is that it would become a system you needed to learn in and of itself in order to navigate the treachery of trying to manage a modern React app.
I’m not disparaging it generally though. It was truly useful to many people and reduced barriers to allowing people to more easily experience React. Arguably, the mess of needing to understand internals of CRA to solve weird bugs or needing to eject was in some ways a good thing. Perhaps people wouldn’t have made it that far without the initial ease of building with react!
You’re absolutely right though. The design of CRA imposed a lot of inevitable issues. Partially due to how webpack works and due to (in my opinion) the fragility of the npm ecosystem. There was so much complexity and so many dependencies. Perhaps some of these things changed for the better over time — it has been a while since I looked at it. The last time I did, that aspect was labyrinthine and awful to navigate when things went wrong.
Definitely, it was neat how the developers gave you a survey if you did use "eject".
But I think the answer is to deal with the issue of making tools more easily composable, or improving the documentation of how to use them, rather than providing the abstraction.
I’m not disparaging it generally though. It was truly useful to many people and reduced barriers to allowing people to more easily experience React. Arguably, the mess of needing to understand internals of CRA to solve weird bugs or needing to eject was in some ways a good thing. Perhaps people wouldn’t have made it that far without the initial ease of building with react!
You’re absolutely right though. The design of CRA imposed a lot of inevitable issues. Partially due to how webpack works and due to (in my opinion) the fragility of the npm ecosystem. There was so much complexity and so many dependencies. Perhaps some of these things changed for the better over time — it has been a while since I looked at it. The last time I did, that aspect was labyrinthine and awful to navigate when things went wrong.