> like individual loaders/modules are/were slow, rather than webpack itself tbh this is just nitpicking, I'm not a react developer to do CRA debugging for them

> like individual loaders/modules are/were slow, rather than webpack itself tbh this is just nitpicking, I'm not a react developer to do CRA debugging for them. They're paid by Facebook a couple orders of magnitude more than what we're making here, and if they're fine with the intact CRA configuration being that slow, while a third-party alternative rips through the massive pile of shit I'm working on while not bringing any obvious downsides, I'll just switch to the alternative. It's a well known problem: esbuild, which is the base of vite's HMR, boasts of speeds dozens to hundreds of times faster than webpack: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild?tab=readme-ov-file#why https://github.com/evanw/esbuild?tab=readme-ov-file#why