[adchurch]

Imo it's a question of prioritization - time spent fiddling with a Webpack config is time that could have been spent on something that will more immediately benefit a user. That's the big advantage we saw for switching to Next.js, which handles this and many other details for us, without the confusing & brittle hacks that had accumulated in our CRA setup.

> Thus you never learn what actually makes it all work.

I agree this is unsatisfying - however it's a problem no matter what! We have to live at some level of abstraction in order to make any forward progress. There can still be lots of learning along the way!