As discussed in this GitHub thread:

• We want process.env handling to happen in one place instead of directly referencing process.env in the application (as referencing them directly is a common pattern in the web applications due to code optimizations this provides we want to clarify in the code that we intentionally decided to not do this so that later down the road we know why and we don't try to refactor it again)
• process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development' checks should be an exception so that we don't bundle dev only code (like react and other devtools) with the application