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Being a newbie to React I’m always told by my experienced React peers that ‘creat react app’ is the right way to go about building react apps. Can you explain why we should build Webpack from scratch ?

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I setup webpack myself on larger apps. There’s a lot of configuration options that you can’t change in CRA without ejecting. Changing how modules are loaded, changing options for css loading or svgs, for example. I prefer to start my own instead of ejecting, because I don’t need everything it comes with and prefer to know every module inside my app, and not include extra things CRA comes with. Adding new loaders, changing Babel presets, there’s so much you can’t change and these things matter in large apps.

I think if you're just trying to learn React and want to get started with the fewest steps possible, yes.

However, I think knowing (JS) build configurations is highly desirable and you're way better off understanding how to set up Webpack and understand what its doing.

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