Also, it’s a mess separating stuff between react and the server, especially when building with express/node as the backend and the whole codebase together

It’s such a pain having clear separation in development where everything runs off of the react server by default, but then it won’t when deploying, so either you end up doing all sorts of weird stuff or you need to be building and running production locally constantly, thus defeating the whole convenience of having a dev server that can hot reload the changes