People who use React tend to want to use modern browser capabilities - and anyone who does will need transpilation because browsers have different API support -

People who use React tend to want to use modern browser capabilities - and anyone who does will need transpilation because browsers have different API support - the cost of not having an all-controlling monopoly. People developing on other platforms love to complain about the build tools on the web, but those same people only have the luxury of simpler build pipelines because they have greater control over the machines their code will be run on. I don’t see React as having caused this problem in any way (feel free to include React via a script tag from a CDN and worry about the compatibility of your code yourself), and I also don’t see this as a problem that will go away any time soon for web development. That all said, I do think it’s getting better - all the major browsers have switched to be auto-updating, so it’s feasible for many projects to drop support for IE altogether and only support ES6; if you manage your CSS in JS, you don’t need to downcompile languages like SCSS; the two of those together mitigates a lot of the need for sophisticated build tools.