[mexicocitinluez]

> but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.

There is a decent bit of history around that page and whether some things should go in a collapsible div and whether that was prioritizing certain frameworks over other ones.

One thing I'm still salty about is that CRA isn't mentioned anywhere (in the entire site). It's like it never existed.

[acemarke]

Hi! I played a major part in getting that "installation" page rewritten to actually mention other tools like Vite :)

The general TLDR is:

- CRA was listed in the _old_ docs site

- The new docs site coincided with the React team emphasizing "frameworks" to provide an all-in-one build experience and hopefully lead to better apps.

- That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.

- CRA broke when React 19 came out in Dec 2024. This caused problems for beginners.

- I pushed the React team to both deprecate CRA and finally rewrite the setup pages to list other build tools as valid options.

I wrote up a much longer background of what happened around the "frameworks" push and this docs page here:

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2025/06/react-community-20...

And here's the issue I filed pushing the React team to deprecate CRA (after some online discussion):

- https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/17004

and a follow-up PR where I tried to rewrite the initial rather confusing post-CRA-deprecation "Creating Your Own Framework" page with a more relevant "Creating a React App" page:

- https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/pull/7618

but the overall point of _all_ of this is that CRA was unmaintained as of 2023, the community had _already_ moved on to Vite, and all this was an attempt to get the React docs to reflect that reality.

[mexicocitinluez]

Hey acemark,

I've been following you and some of the other main React devs.

> That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.

I had followed a decent bit of this back on Twitter, and appreciate you guys trying to make the documentation better (despite all of the drama that came up as a result).

And while it's definitely slowed down a bit, I still randomly see a "What happened to CRA" on the r/react sub.

I guess what bothers me the most is that CRA was not only mine, but quite a few others first introduction to React. And it's just weird that it wasn't even called out in the new docs (even back in 2022-2023). Like it had never existed.

Regardless, I appreciate that you guys care enough to help move React in the right direction. A lot happened while this was going on, and you guys put up with A LOT during this process.