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I could totally see how you'd arrive there. Backstory:

create-react was a starter boilerplate for React built and maintained by Facebook. This was when webpack was the standard and just getting a local development environment to "hello world" for React could be challenging.[1]

That project was depreciated and the popularity of the Next.js site framework for react projects (plus I certainly assume heavy lobbying from Vercel) pushed the react docs to officially suggest create-next as the new starting point.[2]

Note that there are many other ways to start a react project and there are also many react projects that don't use or need Nextjs. (I use react quite a bit but I pair it with Astro.js, for example.)

I would say that a lightweight Vite template is really all you need for a lot of early success with a local environment for learning / building with React.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app [2] https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app

3 comments

> That project was depreciated and the popularity of the Next.js site framework for react projects (plus I certainly assume heavy lobbying from Vercel) pushed the react docs to officially suggest create-next as the new starting point.

It seems like Vercel had enough money and hype to lure react devs away from facebook to work for them. I see this as the biggest reason why react is pushing users towards vercel. Further, Vercel was able to work very closely with the react dev team when developing react server components, giving vercel a first-to-market advantage and a headstart on vendor lock-in.

This is a very generous take.

Yeah, this is what I was remembering. Glad to see I didn't flat out hallucinate the idea that "create-next" as the starting spot for creating a React site.