I created a react application using create-react-app boilerplate, which seems to be very popular, hot reload some times updates when any of the files changes and some times
One additional case I just experience is when using multiple version of nodejs with NVM in parallel. Basically, I have two terminal windows, one run node 10.x, other on node 9.x, and Webpack watcher stops seeing change.
The solution is to bring both to the same node version