Dev team migrates 5-year-old React admin app from CRA to Vite+SWC in 70 days

Engineers at ZURU migrated DreamNet, their internal React admin platform, from Create React App and Webpack to Vite and SWC to eliminate slow build times and near-unusable hot module replacement. The project, spanning 166 changed files and 70 days, revealed that CRA had embedded Webpack-specific semantics deep into the codebase over five years, making the migration far more complex than a simple config swap. The team deliberately kept the React version, router, and deployment contracts unchanged to ensure any behavioral difference could be treated as a clear regression. A 23-line Vite config handled the bundler switch, while the bulk of the work involved auditing and replacing Webpack assumptions across the source. The effort went through 28 diff revisions and 19 review comments before reaching production.