i was porting a c++ app to the web and the node_modules folder alone had more files and more bytes than the entire c++ part. by more than an order of magnitude, if i recall

i'm not a javascript hater (i think modern JS and TS are pretty good all things considered!) and i'm not even a react hater (i maintain two react apps! not apps-pretending-to-be-websites, actual applications); i am however definitely a create-react-app hater. i cannot imagine why you would actually want this abomination

@stargirl yes

the React apps I maintain are... if I had more time and inclination I'd rather do it without React and the application would be better, but this is sorta how I ended up doing them for lack of more knowledge and experience

they're not terrible, they're carefully designed to import a fairly conservative set of libraries and they don't need a minute of runtime to build. but they're definitely not good either

@stargirl in this particular case I happened to have a lot of inherently imperative bits, so half of the React-importing code is basically working around React's entire model

I used React because it had an UI components library I wanted to use (I'm really bad with CSS). the library since got deprecated or something, I think. if I could wave a magic wand and have CSS fall out of the sky fully formed I'd just use Web Components