I have no idea what you are talking about. React doesn't require any tooling. Drop a reference to React from some cdn in your HTML file and you are good to go. People confuse the myriad of libraries and tools complementary to React for React. You don't need create react app for Hello world.
Create React App gives you a zero configuration way to not only write hello world, but also bootstrap a non-trivial production ready application. In the company I work for, we were previously using JSPM/SystemJS/Gulp. We replaced all of that with create-react-app. It allows you to very easily bootstrap existing applications on top of it: http://fredrik.anderzon.se/2016/12/04/adding-create-react-ap...
And if you want full control of your project, you can "eject" and CRA will generate the webpack configuration file being used so that you can tweak to your heart's content.
I use React daily, and the whole experience has been extremely pleasant.
Create React App gives you a zero configuration way to not only write hello world, but also bootstrap a non-trivial production ready application. In the company I work for, we were previously using JSPM/SystemJS/Gulp. We replaced all of that with create-react-app. It allows you to very easily bootstrap existing applications on top of it: http://fredrik.anderzon.se/2016/12/04/adding-create-react-ap...
And if you want full control of your project, you can "eject" and CRA will generate the webpack configuration file being used so that you can tweak to your heart's content.
I use React daily, and the whole experience has been extremely pleasant.