I like how for your brief documentation you start with a single index.html file. Too many web/framework docs start with a command that gives you a directory full of who knows what, which tends to negatively affect beginners more than anyone
But I do agree with the CLI for bootstrapping being a problem for react. It's less of the CLI itself and more of the mountains it moves under the hood to setup the app. I run a single command and get an absolutely massive project. Yes the final dist file is only KBs in size, but the entire build process that gets scaffolded is still part of my project. That single command install seems "easy" but leaves me with a huge amount of existential dread - no matter how much the tooling "paves the path" it doesn't delegate responsibility. Ultimately I'm on the hook for this application and when things don't work it's on me to understand why and fix them. After a CRA install, I'm often left feeling like I'm looking off a cliff into an abyss that is going to take a huge investment to understand.
The last time I used React was inside a big company. I felt safe using it there because there was a team responsible for "owning" react inside the company. I followed their docs to start with CRA and pull in their component library. If anything inside my CRA app went sideways I _had_ delegated responsibility to another team for that, I had a support line that I could reach out to to get help and ultimately problems at that level were their responsibility. That isn't true in my personal projects - so I don't use it there.
FWIW I actually feel the same way about infrastructure components. I am Terraform certified, have been sysadmining Linux installs for over a decade, have built a serverless platform inside FAANG, played SRE, etc. But still K8S, Linux, etc. leave me with similar feelings. When I can delegate their responsibility I'll build on top of them or participate on teams that manage them, but for my own stuff there is too much to chew for me to adopt that for a personal or client project. Even with my background, for my projects I choose platforms where I can delegate that part of the stack to a vendor. These days I'm building on Cloudflare Workers, R2, and PlanetScale for my DB (until D1 is prod ready). When I adopt a service - I pay for it at a rate that gets me support contracts. That $$$ is funding an engineering team far greater than me to build, support, maintain, and understand that chunk of the system so I don't have to.
I will never forget the visceral disgust I felt in that moment.