> I’ve never met somebody able to make a react app work without it.

How so? You just need to call createRoot and you have react working.

The reason why people use CRA is that it comes with all the tooling required for modern webdev, such as webpack, babel, eslint, prettier, jest, etc pre-configured for you.

Setting up all these tools takes quite a bit of time, but that's not react specific. You would want those same tools for any frontend project regardless of react.

> Create react app drags in about a million dependencies, and I’ve never met somebody able to make a react app work without it.

I’ve done react “from scratch” with manual configuration of the build toolchain, without a builder or template app (there's a lot of each around, CRA isn't the only one.)

It's not particularly difficult, but there's no payoff (in any real world use case I’ve had so far) for the extra work.

Agree, and re-hydrating projects that have been left sitting for more than a few months invariably leads to dependency mismatch hell.