I'm not following your logic. React+ReactDom only has 3 dependencies, so I don't understand how that follows. How is React bloated because `create-react-app` gives you functionality to setup a PWA? If I don't care about PWAs, I don't need to use it, but `create-react-app` downloads it anyways.

The majority of the dependencies pulled in on create-react-app is from the `react-scripts` which helps entirely with scaffolding. Saying that React is bloated because the scaffolding generation tool downloads too much code sounds crazy.