Apply latest updates from CRA upstream (minus deprecation notice)

[karlhorky]

New version of CRA will be released today, including a deprecation notice (facebook#17003):

• Umbrella: CRA breaks with React 19, and CRA needs deprecation notices facebook/create-react-app#17004 (comment)

It also includes some other changes and fixes which will modernize some things, as mentioned in facebook#13725:

Merging this PR could come with #13725 and it should get green and give CRA a bit of a longer run

We should:

1. Apply the latest changes from upstream
2. Remove the deprecation notice
3. Disable the version checker

We should do these things to keep our @upleveled/create-react-app fork alive as long as possible (until we switch our curriculum from create-react-app to Next.js).

[rickhanlonii]

What's the diff between this fork and upstream? Looks like it's mostly just fixing the deps issue, typescript fixes and node-sass fixes (which would be good to upstream)? Would you be interested in helping to maintain create-react-app directly instead of maintaining the fork?

[karlhorky]

I think our original motivation was to add pnpm support for students with slower machines, but then since we had a chance to fix some DX things, we:

1. Upgraded some deps including the TypeScript
2. Added Sass by default for CSS modules
3. Allowing for ESM with "type": "module"
4. Fixed some other things which were causing a workflow problems for students eg. deploying to Netlify or ESLint errors with Jest, etc

The reason why I didn't contribute back was lack of response when I was contributing fixes before (and the publicly-announced deprecation):

• Allow TypeScript 5+ in peerDependencies facebook/create-react-app#13071
• Avoid no-floating-promises ESLint problem facebook/create-react-app#11794

But I would be interested in helping to maintain projects which are important to the React team, if CRA is still that.

---

Why not just switch to Vite? Because it was not a drop-in replacement and we wanted to devote any effort to a bigger switch from the create-react-app parts of our curriculum to Next.js:

• https://bsky.app/profile/karlhorky.com/post/3lg67vbkizk2r

[DogPawHat]

So once your course materials move from cra to nextjs this fork will also be deprecated?

[karlhorky]

Right, that sounds correct.