[Other] Explore possibility of removing create-react-app

[justinkambic]

Task summary

Today we rely on create-react-app for the automatic bundling and serving of our frontend. This is really convenient because it eliminates a lot of maintenance and setup tasks that we would otherwise need to implement manually.

This also has drawbacks.

1. We have no control over updating dependencies that are out of date with security concerns. There are several and we are already on the latest version of the package.
2. We have limited control over how its internal webpack is working, and if we wanted to explore optimization of our bundle size or other build-related tasks, we'd need to do this without using create-react-app.
3. We have tangential dependencies like wait-on that we need to use for concurrency when scripting our dev mode. It might be possible to eliminate those as well with a custom solution.
4. Expanding typescript support to the backend is complicated because we need multiple configs and it's much more difficult to work around create-react-app's internal configurations.

For these reasons I think it might be worth exploring the elimination of create-react-app from the codebase. The tradeoff to reduced dependency load and greater control over the build process is that we would have additional setup code of our own to maintain/update as the application changes and grows over time.

Linked resources

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Additional information

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[justinkambic]

React team provides an eject script that will give over complete control to all the underlying build configs.

They also recommend forking react-scripts as an alternative to ejecting.

It's probably worth a spike of both of these options so we can see just how involved eject is, vs. the convenience:difficulty ratio in the forking option.