Migrating a 5-year-old React admin app from CRA + Webpack to Vite + SWC — 166 files, 70 days

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The build was fine. Everything else was on fire.

Every codebase has a number that nobody says out loud.

Ours was the time between hitting Ctrl+S and seeing the change in the browser. Long enough to check Slack. Long enough to forget what you were testing. On a cold start, long enough to make coffee.

DreamNet is the internal admin platform for ZURU's housing division — user management, RBAC, asset catalogues, project publishing, release builds, an order-pricing engine, event management, dashboards with charts and maps. Roughly 130 source files across src/scene alone. It was scaffolded with Create React App and had been running on react-scripts@3.0.1 — a release from 2019 — held together with rewire, env-cmd, and node-sass@4.14.1, which needed a specific Node version to even compile.