This has been the case for several years now, I think. The official docs suggested Next for a while, but it got too complicated. Vite is the standard replacement now.
It has been the case for years. Dan abramov admitted that CRA is on maintenance mode in 2021, but as the issue states, "CRA deprecation is not noted anywhere".
After the recent blow up which resulted in the linked GitHub issue, react core team has officially added note that "CRA is deprecated" and marked CRA as deprecated in npm.
One would argue that it is already the case since, but it is also the case that Vite is current goto for React SPA, but react team still disagree on it.
