You're conflating React the library with create-react-app which is a collection of pre-configured tooling for making SPAs. React on it's own is very much just a library with a couple functions.
The standard docs can go fuck themselves. I've never seen a community try and fuck up a good library as hard as the React community does.
React itself is great. Almost everything built on top of it and every word spoken about it on the internet is garbage.
The incessent focus on shit like CRA, NextJS and people shitting themselves over "NIH" is going to kill React in the next decade and we're going to be stuck with something 10x shittier in it's place. Well done team!
For bad docs, my stuff worked pretty well following them. Is create-react-app really gonna screw up my project?
Will say that the React Native docs suck because they keep trying to shove Expo down your throat, which simply doesn't work if you're trying to actually build a production app, plus it keeps changing and breaking stuff. Or at least that was the case a few years ago; I haven't even gone there since.
Edit: Seems react.dev is beyond create-react-app and now it's pushing some overkill stuff that feels like corporate lock-in. Yeah that's a concern.
Part of that is almost certainly because it is far, far easier to explain how to get started with create-react-app then it would be to explain the various alternative approaches, especially considering how inexperienced on average the kind of people who are looking up how to set up a react project must be (professional developers needing the information for their actual work probably constitute a small minority), even if those alternative approaches themselves are not complicated at all to those who have the prerequisite knowledge to understand how a library like react would be incorporated into their particular setup.
