[jbreckmckye]

I'm actually writing about this right now. I've worked with a lot of teams that have kicked off big, production-grade applications with boilerplates like Create-React-App. Your intuition is right: they get to prod having no idea how their buildchain works, and once something goes wrong they're stuck.

You really don't want your first time reasoning about your build process to be some kind of deployment disaster or production bug. And that's exactly what these tools are selling you.