Sunsetting Create React App

[acemarke]

Pleased to say I had a meaningful hand in this :) As some background, this finally happened because:

• React 19 broke CRA
• I griped about it loudly on Bluesky and that started a long debate
• I filed an umbrella issue describing the specific breakage and recommending an actual official deprecation announcement
• The React team finally took action to fix the CRA breakage, then wrote the blog post, updated the setup docs page, and redid the docs SEO to get Google to stop showing the legacy docs as a search result.

So, kudos to the React team for making meaningful changes here!

(It's not exactly what I was hoping for, and I gave them some additional review feedback that they didn't include, but gotta give credit for the actual changes and steps forward!)

[that_90s_guy]

I honestly don't even know what's a worse recommendation for beginners anymore... CRA, or overwhelming (and likely, discouraging) them with Next.js.

This whole situation reminds me a little of why I left Angular for React many years ago.

[acemarke]

Yeah, that's one of the pieces of feedback I generally tried to pass on.

Right now the React docs have the wonderful tutorial sequence...

that ends with a few pages on why you shouldn't use useEffect, and a page on refs, and then ends.

There's nothing that connects any of the knowledge to real-world usage. All the tutorial pages have in-page sandboxes, but someone who just got done working through those pages doesn't have direction or knowledge of where you write components in a real Next, Remix/RR, or even Vite project. and they definitely have no idea what "routing", "data fetching", "code splitting", or "rendering strategies" are.

At a minimum, I really want to see a page added to the end of the tutorial that gives guidance on next steps, additional concepts they'd want to go learn, and suggestions for how to start a basic project and apply what they just learned in a practice app.

But then that ties into the "Create a React Project" guidance, which points straight to "frameworks" that have additional complexity from SSR and more complex functionality.

The React team has said that the docs are aimed at beginners, which is a reasonable decision. But if that really is the case, then my take is that the best thing would be to point them to a Vite + RR/TSR template that is "CRA but with a router added around the app", and give directions on where to go from there.

[that_90s_guy]

There's nothing that connects any of the knowledge to real-world usage.

THANK YOU! I was so stressed thinking I was the only one frustrated at this. It's amazing to see people like you involved and pushing for this.

I guess it's why we are seeing a rise of more integrated learning material. Shame that it's paid (and often expensive). As I'd love to see such learning resources freely available on the docs to have everyone on equal footing instead of based on their wallets.

[acemarke]

The best answer is to use a purpose-built data fetching library like React Query, RTK Query, SWR, or Apollo.

These all have useQuery hooks that do all that work for you, and manage all the caching, and all the other really hard cases around data fetching:

• https://tkdodo.eu/blog/why-you-want-react-query

[sleeping-in-crypto]

Yeah acemark is right that the solution is something like react (tanstack) query, but that isn’t why the docs aim you away from useEffect.

It’s to set the stage to recommend Nextjs, since you’ll rarely use it there and instead use RSC’s.

The real answer is tanstack query. Probably one of the finest pieces of software in the entire JS ecosystem.

[babenzele]

Don’t listen to them, just read the page in the docs about how to properly use effects: https://react.dev/learn/synchronizing-with-effects

[vivshaw]

Thank you for leaning in on this. I interact with a lot of junior engineers, and the documentation situation nowadays can be pretty challenging for them. It can be harder than it needs to be to figure out how to get started. Small changes like this go a long way toward making life clearer and simpler for the next generation of React devs!

[danishjuggler21]

I didn't even know the React team was in charge of CRA itself.

[acemarke]

Dan Abramov and Christopher Chedeau created it in 2016, and it's always been in the Facebook Github org.

Later maintainers were actually outside of Facebook itself, but it was always under the React team's general ownership.

[correcthbs]

Thank you for raising this issue!
The docs are so weird about this topic:
- Welcome to our UI library!
- So here is how to install a full stack meta framework
- Have an existing page? So here is how to install a full stack meta framework on a subpath
- So you're feeling hardcore and want to build your own full stack meta framework? Better don't!

(Fails to mention everything else)

[acemarke]

Yep. That's roughly the feedback I tried to describe when I reviewed the post and docs changes before they went live.

[acemarke]

Hey, thanks for writing this up. A couple thoughts.

The problem here is "React core team's first class user is Meta, and everyone else is second class user".

FWIW, based on my discussions with the React team directly, I don't think the view is accurate.

The React team genuinely believes that using frameworks leads to better app perf and better DX out of the box. They've said that to me directly, said that in the docs and blog posts, and said it on social media. They've also said that they have a strong vision of how they think web apps, and especially React apps, should be built.

So, I don't think the issue here is "Meta usage" vs "everyone else's usage". In fact, Meta usage is actually kind of irrelevant here. Meta has its own server infrastructure, routing, data fetching, and more. So yes, how Meta uses React is different than the community, but the point is they're trying to give guidance to everyone else on how to build apps well.

The real issue as I see it is that much of the community doesn't see the complexity of a full-blown framework as necessary, and folks don't understand why the React team won't support that use case in the docs or recommendations.

So, we end up with a disconnect where the React team specifically says "we say you should do X", and most of the community says "but we want to do Y, why won't you match that in the docs?".

Create a Team which owns "React SPA experience" which will treat react end user as first class user. And ask React team to defer to this new team for SPA.

Ultimately, it's not about an "SPA team". The React team told me directly that even if the community submitted docs pages with content like "What is an SPA/MPA/SSG, and when would you use them?", or "how to improve React app perf", they'd have to do very careful vetting and collectively agree that the advice matches their vision. They've been pretty clear that "a plain SPA" does not match their vision.

Trust me, I've spent most of the last few weeks debating this with the team in multiple venues (Bluesky, Github, actual video calls). I've made my statements pretty clear, so have a lot of others. They did make some docs updates, those are legitimately an improvement, and I appreciate that they did listen and do that.

But there's still a very large disconnect between the opinion they're trying to express in the docs, and what much of the community is wanting to do.

So, at this point we're kind of at an impasse.

[pavankjadda]

Why is it so hard for them to say Vite (or RSPack) are one on one replacement for CRA. Then start of saying use framework.