I do find it interesting how some people feel they need to understand every bit of config and setup with Webpack and Babel before they feel comfortable moving o

I do find it interesting how some people feel they need to understand every bit of config and setup with Webpack and Babel before they feel comfortable moving on to React itself. The point of Create-React-App is to abstract over that process so you _don't_ have to worry about it, at least not right away. Apparently there's a certain subset of devs out there that isn't comfortable moving on until they know exactly what's going on under the hood. That's fine, it's just a lot more rare :) For everyone else, Create-React-App is absolutely the way to go for getting started with React. Focus on learning React first, and worry about learning build configs later.