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Paragon has seen significant investment, and upgrading will improve code reuse, a11y, brandability, consistency, and developer velocity. This isn't a typo - Paragon is 11 14 major versions behind in edx-platform (2.6.4 -> 1316.161.40).
React has proven to be a much faster, much more effective way for us to write frontend code, and there are a variety of features and security fixes between edx-platform's version and latest (16.1.0 -> 16.14.0). It's nearly a different framework than it was in 2017 when 16.1.0 came out, and better for it.
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We are NOT upgrading Webpack with this effort, though there’s value in following to do so.
Webpack in edx-platform is 2.7.0. Webpack in frontend-build is at 45.44.2.Webpack itself is up to 5.21.20.
There are a number of breaking changes and config schema differences through the major versions.
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