I've been on the other end of that story, where entire dev organizations freak out because of a concern with webpack, babel, or some other piece of the stack... and nobody knows how to fix it.

CRA has its place, certainly. But it is a black box, and somebody in your org should know the tools well enough to make good decisions to build up a product from scratch without CRA... and then you may still choose to use CRA, but it is an educated choice, not a default answer because you do not know any other options.

I agree with it being important to know how to do this stuff from scratch (with Google, let's be realistic), but the black box problem is solved by ejecting.

Have you ever ejected a CRA? If you think your problems are about to be solved after doing the above... I have a bridge to sell you.

My excuse for longing for something non-CRA is updating an existing frontend to React piece by piece. To integrate it with the existing Django app’s asset pipeline, I kind of had to eject and now my Webpack configuration and its dependencies are completely out of control. I am considering starting over with another tool chain, copying the existing components to the new structure. Replacing the whole thing with a new SPA would not have been feasible.

We have a project we unejected to CRA. Or maybe injected...