[ojhughes]

It really blows my mind that the latest, greatest technology is so difficult to work with it requires a meta-tool manage the process.

[ng12]

CRA actually has almost nothing to do with React and a whole lot to do with other tools (Babel, ES6, Webpack, Jest). You don't need most of them to build a React application, it's mostly about developer experience and the surrounding ecosystem.

FWIW Angular does the same thing with Angular-CLI. The "problem" is the web dev ecosystem, not React itself.