Bug: Basic React app broken with `resolve.preserveSymlinks` on Windows

[yannbf]

Describe the bug

At Storybook we are preparing to get it ready for Vite 8. After doing some investigation why our Storybook + React + Windows were failing, I found out that it's related to a single vite config: preserveSymlinks. When rendering any React component in Storybook, it seems as if there are duplicated versions of React which normally cause problems where hooks end up not being available.

I slimmed things down to a bare minimal reproduction, essentially npm create vite + setting that one property in the vite config file. That is enough for the base app to break with TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'useState').

Reproduction

https://github.com/yannbf/rolldown-windows-symlinks-issue

Steps to reproduce

• Run the app with npm run dev
• See the issue

System Info

System:
    OS: Windows 10 10.0.19045
    CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820HQ CPU @ 2.90GHz    
    Memory: 4.27 GB / 15.90 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.21.0 
    Yarn: 1.22.22 
    npm: 10.9.4 
    pnpm: 8.6.2 
    bun: 1.1.17 
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 145.0.7632.117
    Edge: Chromium (141.0.3537.85)
    Internet Explorer: 11.0.19041.5794
  npmPackages:
    @vitejs/plugin-react: ^5.0.4 => 5.1.4
    rolldown-vite:  7.3.0

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs and the Rolldown-related guide.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[sapphi-red]

vitejs#21720