Description
The basic problem is explained well in CRA: facebook/create-react-app#186 . Unintuitive but does work eventually (I don't think I even knew it would work on the second save though, pretty sure I just thought it didn't work period :o).
facebook/create-react-app#212 (comment) and the sentiment of this issue in general is similar to some of my own reservations -- I'd much rather npm install the package myself and the auto install is different from the usual process of development without running a watcher or this plugin.
In this case, I think using react-dev-utils's WatchMissingNodeModulesPlugin might make more sense to include. That might be the only thing I would use from that package though (so installing the whole thing is a bit wasteful, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Another important note about the NpmInstallPlugin is that it currently doesn't work with Webpack 4 and has a number of outstanding issues: webpack-contrib/install-webpack-plugin#123 . https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-plugin-install-deps is a fork from the PR that supports Webpack 4 fwiw.