Also, take a look at this response from 2021:
"Like I said earlier, it was always the intention that we're not going to be able to work on it full-time... [I]t was intentionally designed for this kind of sporadic development. We would get critical fixes out as soon as posible, but overall, starting with 2.0, it's mostly in maintenance mode and does not strive to be the best tool for production React apps. It is a tool to get started and get something running fast. Perhaps, it's not even best at that anymore."
https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/discussions/117...
Make sense, but the lack of an "oficial" solution doesn't help https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project
Html and css have only been getting better over the past two decades; they are not the problem; no need to resort to inline styles and tables. As for going back to server-side templating with php, this is a very good option.
CRA was useful when it first appeared because the whole space was a big mess. But it very quickly outlived its usefulness, and its approach was really problematic in my opinion. The config was too complex to eject and modify compared to what you could do yourself with Webpack directly.
The tools got much better, it's much easier to just set up a basic Webpack or Vite setup today compared to when CRA was originally created. And the simple configs are much simpler to debug and understand when something doesn't work as expected.
Yes agree, but writing and marinating config for multiple projects just don`t scale. Not to mention we need something dirty and fast.