| 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. |
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.