I agree that create-react-app is bloated and overkill, but that's also a lot of the value in it, or at least it has been for me. When I used CRA for a project

I agree that create-react-app is bloated and overkill, but that's also a lot of the value in it, or at least it has been for me. When I used CRA for a project about a year ago, it spit out a gigantic README with everything anyone ever might want to know about JS development, it had a long webpack configuration that hot-loaded CSS and auto-reloaded the page on JS edits, it set up the app to use a service worker, and it used a ton of other technologies and libraries and tools that I didn't know existed. They've scaled it back quite a bit since then, but I think getting a feel for what's out there is really valuable, and even though it has way more than you need, it's nice to be able to easily try those things to learn what they are and confirm that you don't need them. Otherwise, you might end up with a community of people who don't know about ESLint because none of the tutorials thought it was critical to set up before getting started. One mindset (not necessarily for beginners) is that when working on a serious project that will need non-trivial config, it's best to run create-react-app, eject, carve away all of the unnecessary stuff that you don't want, then take ownership over every aspect of the build system and tooling. That leaves you with a much more solid starting point than if you start totally from scratch and only add things as you need them.