Use Vite instead, it has very nice developer experience. Webpack is a "legacy" bundler, while it is supported, is shouldn't really be used in new projects if you really value your sanity.
Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having to build your own configuration (it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult).
Until you eject a CRA :)
That depends entirely on your definition of “magic”. Needing a specific incantation of seven different plugins and rules, that are often conflicting and incomprehensible, to get a basic project to build, is the same as magic to me.
I assume you mean magic == conventions or implicit behavior. I’ll take that over the Webpack mess any day.
Neither of which are necessarily negatives of course!
Only thing is that for every minute gained from those speedy rust builds, I lost five more on debugging stuff that used to work fine with Babel + having to learn this new language to write replacements for now unsupported plugins :)
You can't dip into the documentation for the one thing you're trying to do, you have to spend time reading a large chunk of the documentation, then going to forums and such to try an understand the history of how that one thing you're trying to do has changed over webpack's history.
Then 5 months later when you're doing it for another project, you have to re-read all that documentation again because one other thing is different.
Compare that waste of time and effort to:
A developer is now unavailable and you are taking over the project. The project uses a modern build-system/module-loader/etc... You need to change one thing to the way to project is built.
You don't have to learn an uber nested spaghetti config file that looks like a domain-specific language. You just read the miminal configuration the previous developer left you and now you know what to change, or how to add the one thing you need to do. You've now saved days of work.
I just replaced Webpack with Vite, in a 2yo React project, with relatively standard webpack config (scss, fonts, assets copying, minify etc). I was able to remove 24 total devDependencies packages, including the whole of babel and its related ones, bunch of webpack plugins that broke our build on every packages upgrade (e.g. to Webpack 4, then again for Webpack 5) etc etc.
We now have nothing to do with babel, hard-to-understand plugins that someone added since it was solving a build error, nothing to do with webpack, just 1 almost non-existent config file, instant HMR, and 3x faster build...
You were meant to rely on sourcemaps to get something on your debugger, but despite using the latest Chrome and developer tools at the time, I could never get it to work to actually debug sites.
I know Rollup, Vite and etc had a much easier time providing an easier developer experience because they rely on the browser's native ESM support, but I never could understand why webpack decided to mangle the code so badly.
How did you end up with this assessment? I'm not a fan either, but it's still very popular, I doubt it will go away in the next 5 years.
What about module federation? Has any other bundler implemented that?
What a weird thing to say. I feel like people say this because they don't understand it's uses, and it's versatility.