Hi Chad, thanks for sharing your use case. There are different use cases for this approach. In our case, we want to run the same child application in different parent applications. Therefore, we npm publish the child application for the entire build directory to be reused.

Apparently, you have a different use case. In your case, it probably makes more sense to use the same approach as the development environment. It probably has something to do with the webpack config difference between react-scripts start and react-scripts build, as you have described. We fully understand that webpack config for CRA is daunting, while we modify some other configuration. Please keep us posted if you find some good approach. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and ideas!