Upgrading webpack to latest.
Because webpack 5 has breaking changes, there was a lot of changes required in the configurations.
Also it required a lot of upgrades to different npms such as eslint and loaders.
Also to keep the project working in an expected way, I copy and pasted the config folder from a freshly created and ejected Create React App.
I looked into plugging in our application into a Create React App but we have a feature set in our webpack config that can only be done through a custom webpack config.
That feature being importing images through absolute paths. (this can only be done with webpack but you can load js / ts files using absolute paths without configuring webpack)
This is a very minor feature provided to use by webpack, but other than this, we can abstract away all of webpack with create-react-app.
So sum up the trade off:
Give up absolute imports of images so we can plug our app into a Create React Template
or
Keep absolute imports of images but always deal with the complications of an ejected react app.
Also sorry this revision is very big, if you have any idea of how to break this up, let me know.