Actually the funny thing is, unexpectedly, I found developing a Chrome extension much harder than building a generic web app. The closest thing to hot reloading

Actually the funny thing is, unexpectedly, I found developing a Chrome extension much harder than building a generic web app. The closest thing to hot reloading my React app could get to was to use npm watch and rebuild on very change, which was much slower. As even the slightest FE change would take ages to visually check (so much so I had to build parts of the FE styling in another project). The main thing is I couldn't ever use the Chrome API on the default React npm start page, I would get an error unless I actually ran npm run build and unpacked the extension to use manually. (I heard from a friend this is because that Chrome API is only usable by an actual built extension)