The Tooling Shift
Vite has become the recommended approach for new React projects, according to both React's official documentation and Vite's own setup guides. This represents a meaningful departure from Create React App (CRA), which dominated React onboarding for years.
The change isn't arbitrary. Vite delivers instant hot module reloading without full page refreshes, something CRA struggles with as projects scale. Setup remains straightforward: npm create vite@latest generates a working React project in seconds, with TypeScript support available from the start.
What Changed
Create React App abstracted configuration entirely. That worked when React tooling was immature, but it became a liability as teams needed more control. Vite takes the opposite approach: minimal configuration that remains manageable as projects grow. The vite.config.js file stays readable even in production applications.
The framework-agnostic design matters for enterprises managing multiple frontend stacks. Vite supports React, Vue, Svelte, and Solid through the same toolchain, reducing the number of build systems teams need to maintain.
Implementation Details
Vite uses native ES modules during development, eliminating the bundling step that slows CRA. Production builds still generate optimized, minified code in a dist folder ready for deployment. Environment variables follow a VITE_ prefix pattern, clearer than CRA's approach.
One setup detail: Vite now prompts whether to use rolldown-vite, an experimental Rust-based bundler. The correct answer for production deployments is no. Rolldown lacks documentation and stability guarantees.
Trade-offs
Teams with established CRA workflows face migration costs. Vite's configuration flexibility means developers need to understand more about build tooling than CRA required. For organizations that treated CRA as a black box, this represents a learning curve.
The ecosystem is younger than webpack's. Advanced customization that webpack handled through complex configuration may require different approaches in Vite. That said, most enterprise React applications don't need that level of build customization.
What to Watch
How quickly enterprise teams migrate existing CRA projects to Vite. The tooling shift is clear for new projects. The question is whether the performance gains justify replatforming existing applications, particularly in government and financial services where change control processes add friction.
Vite's plugin ecosystem maturity. As more teams adopt it for production workloads, the stability of third-party plugins becomes critical. This is where CRA's longer track record provided assurance.