> I’ve never met somebody able to make a react app work without it.
How so? You just need to call createRoot and you have react working.
The reason why people use CRA is that it comes with all the tooling required for modern webdev, such as webpack, babel, eslint, prettier, jest, etc pre-configured for you.
Setting up all these tools takes quite a bit of time, but that's not react specific. You would want those same tools for any frontend project regardless of react.
How so? You just need to call createRoot and you have react working.
The reason why people use CRA is that it comes with all the tooling required for modern webdev, such as webpack, babel, eslint, prettier, jest, etc pre-configured for you.
Setting up all these tools takes quite a bit of time, but that's not react specific. You would want those same tools for any frontend project regardless of react.