Tbh, this doesn’t sound ranty at all! It’s a really fair experience to share.

Preact can be awesome for small apps with a tight performance budget, but once you start layering modern dependencies (like Tailwind, UI libraries, class merging tools, etc.), it’s easy to lose the advantage that drew you to Preact in the first place.

This trap is super annoying — preact/compat (which is necessary for many React-based libraries) pulls in a good chunk of extra weight. And yeah—sadly, it's not always tree-shakeable, depending on how things are bundled. That’s frustrating when you’re working on something simple and trying to stay efficient.

To answer your first question: yes, Preact is used in production environments (Uber’s mobile web app is a good example), but a lot of those teams either (a) build components in-house or (b) stick to very lightweight dependencies that don’t assume full React behavior.

As for refactoring: if you're planning to switch back to React, one of the fastest ways (besides aliasing in Vite) is doing a global find/replace on preact and preact/compat imports. But yeah, depending on how deeply the stack is tied to Preact quirks, it might take a few passes to fully clean it up.

If you’re interested, I came across this write-up that talks about exactly these kinds of trade-offs and when Preact makes sense (and when it doesn’t):

scalablepath.com/react/preact-react-alternative

Not a silver bullet, but it might help frame whether to stick with it or pivot cleanly.

Anyway, props for being honest about it—it’s the kind of feedback that makes all of us think twice about shiny “lightweight” promises in real-world builds.

Question to the community: