I generally agree with your thesis (especially WRT this article) but create-react-app is a terrible example. I converted a fairly large handrolled webpack proje

I generally agree with your thesis (especially WRT this article) but create-react-app is a terrible example. I converted a fairly large handrolled webpack project to CRA, and it actually fixed a lot of broken things. For most single page apps, create-react-app occupies an abstraction level "sweet spot". Webpack is too low level and changes too quickly.