> 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.