CRA seems pretty much abandoned. I wouldn’t recommend it for anything nowadays. There are much better options for both starter and serious apps.

I would never touch another project that has ejected from its build tool, and I am almost certain that I would never do an eject on my own projects. The maintenance burden is too high and it always becomes a complete mess as dependencies go out of date.

I’d be interested to know for what reasons others have ejected? I have worked on 3 projects where some idiot dev had ejected for the silliest reasons. Since holding firm on my “never eject stance” I’ve never encountered a problem that I couldn’t solve without reading the docs more.

I’ve been unhappy with both options.

Ejecting gives you an incredibly complicated configuration (as CRA needs configs that can handle _any_ project) with a high maintenance cost as you say.

Not ejecting gave me other headaches. Any advanced stuff that wasn’t directly supported by CRA (that happened multiple times) required me to understand the underlying config _and_ how CRA interfaces with it _and_ how to force CRA to generate the right configs. The classic leaky abstraction problem. Plus, CRA wasn’t bug-free leading to its own problems where I also had to dig into internals. That’s all significant maintenance burden too (added complexity).

Out of the two options I’d almost certainly stick with “don’t eject”, but nowadays I heavily favour “don’t use these tools, keep build tooling simple”. And like so many people, I’m leaning more and more towards “it’s all so crazy complex (and broken) that it’s not worth it, don’t use React”. Things are getting _more_ complex with new developments rather than less, this is an insane ecosystem.

CRA was indeed a headache. Thankfully I use Vite now and I hardly ever think about it for my relatively simple SPAs.

What stack/tools are you currently using?

"I would never touch another project that has ejected from its build tool"

Maybe if it was something that first relied on a large framework, but CRA is not that. It is just a tool that kickstarts the development process, especially for the inexperienced.

Considering all it really provides is ESLint rules and a webpack config, if you're working on a serious project, a day or two of work shouldn't be a blocker. Besides, there are other options you can use besides webpack (e.g. vite, as in this post).

I know webpack scares many people, and TBH it is not a nice DX, but many enterprise/big projects require customizations that required ejections and a blanket statement like "I would never touch another project that has ejected" would severely limit your opportunities in working in the enterprise world.