Can you clarify what you mean by "defeated by the stack"? Are you having trouble setting up a React development environment? If you want to try using React wi

Can you clarify what you mean by "defeated by the stack"? Are you having trouble setting up a React development environment? If you want to try using React without any build tooling or process at all, the main suggestions are: - Use an online IDE like https://codesandbox.io https://codesandbox.io , which is a complete online editor that lets you write React apps, view them in the browser, and even make use of NPM packages . CodePen and StackBlitz are other good choices for online editors. - Create an index.html file with three script tags for React, ReactDOM, and the Babel transformer. There's a pre-written example at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reactjs/reactjs.org/master/static/html/single-file-example.html https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reactjs/reactjs.org/master... . If you do want a local project with the right build setup, the official Create-React-App tool will create projects with the build config abstracted away: https://reactjs.org/docs/installation.html https://reactjs.org/docs/installation.html So, while the recommended way to use React is with a full build process (which lets you use the JSX syntax for rendering components, other modern JS syntax, and produces a proper bundle for deployment), you don't have to learn Webpack or Babel as a prerequisite for learning React.