I'm in the same camp, I feel neutral about CRA - it's great for getting set up quick, but comes with a whole jungle of complexity, even if it's under a simpler

I'm in the same camp, I feel neutral about CRA - it's great for getting set up quick, but comes with a whole jungle of complexity, even if it's under a simpler abstraction most of the time. I just bit the bullet a few years ago and invested time into learning all the moving parts of a full-stack React app, and created generic build scripts with common libraries - it has everything I need and nothing more. I've continued using it to this day, keeping it up to date has been painless mostly, and have built a number of business applications with it. A big advantage of CRA I see is that it provides a standard, well-developed and documented. It's suited for onboarding junior team members, as well as allowing people to jump into new codebases.