Error When Adding Firebase to React Project: Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<'

My react app loads fine locally with nodemon. However, when I tried to add Firebase, html in index.html renders, but none of my react app gets rendered. Additionally, I get error codes about unexpected token '<'. My research indicates this has something to do with passing HTML instead of JS, but I'm not sure where I'm doing that?

My firebase.json file (most stack overflow results seem to point to errors here, but I haven't been able to solve)

{    "database": {      "rules": "database.rules.json"    },    "hosting": {      "public": "build",      "ignore": [        "firebase.json",        "**/.*",        "**/node_modules/**"      ]    }  }  

Below, my h1 'Hi' gets rendered, but none of my react app loads in div id=root.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66837576/error-when-adding-firebase-to-react-project-uncaught-syntaxerror-unexpected-to March 28, 2021 at 09:07AM