What do you use now? I'm currently using Create-React-App for one of my projects and some parts of it are really frustrating. For example, you can't create a Web Worker script without ejecting, or using some tool that intercepts and alters the CRA Webpack configuration.

Should I just bite the bullet and figure out Webpack (or another bundler) from the basics? I feel like that will be inevitable at some point anyway.

Tbh nowadays I use every new project as an opportunity to try something new. I'm in between a Fresh project, a Svelte project, a PWABuilder project, and a Qwik project. They all have their use-cases and {dis-}advantages so it's nice to know a lot of different tools for different jobs

But I've realized a lot of my projects can actually get by pretty far with just vanilla html/css/js and a good reset.css so I have a template for that that I continuously update and I've actually found that to be the most productive. Though that's likely a function of not having to learn something new unlike all my other projects

There's been suggestions on the React repo of dropping the suggestion to use CRA from the docs entirely since it's pretty outdated and not really in keeping with React's current philosophies.

IMO, ESBuild is the best option these days. It’s not as magic or batteries included as Webpack, but there’s very little kept secret from you during the compilation process. It’s fast too!

Another tricky alternative is to just use TypeScript’s compiler. Combined with the new import maps spec, you can target most modern browsers and skip bundling all together.

I'd actually recommend Vite over Esbuild directly. It uses Esbuild under the hood, at least for production builds, but during development it uses the native import syntax with some optimisations to bundle dependencies together somewhat. This gives you a really quick development build, and then a well-optimised but still pretty quick production build.

But I think the real benefit is that it's much easier to get right than Webpack ever was. You don't need to start by configuring a thousand different plugins, rather, you just write an index.html file, reference the root CSS and JS file from there, and then it can figure out the rest, including all the optimisation/minification details, applying Babel, autoprefixing, using browserslist, etc. If it doesn't recognise a file (e.g. because you're importing a .vue or .svelte file) then it'll recommend the right plugin to parse that syntax, and then it's just a case of adding the plugin to a config file and it'll work.

I'm a big fan of Parcel, which is a very similar tool for zero-configuration builds, but Vite feels significantly more polished.

I agree - I love esbuild, but Vite is great and will generally give you what you want and more with minimal hassle. The development server and hot reloading are excellent.

I did recently find one thing that didn’t work out of the box in Vite, though. I needed to write a web worker, but Vite didn’t package it into a single .js file, so I had to call esbuild directly to do that.

Safari supports import maps in TP https://caniuse.com/import-maps

I’m familiar with PostCSS nesting, but I don’t think it requires ampersands (&) for nested element selectors: `.class { p { ... }}` works. I’m having trouble finding a canonical name for the standard flavor of nesting, otherwise I’d be looking for a GitHub issue.