You can actually still do this, and it is kind of a shame it's not documented on react.dev You need to pull in react, plus Babel standalone, and then you can

You can actually still do this, and it is kind of a shame it's not documented on react.dev You need to pull in react, plus Babel standalone, and then you can use <script type="text/jsx"> tags, which means you can bootstrap react components onto your page. But you are going to be basically running a compiler in your user's web browser. That's fine if you want to run that way, but Babel has docs that explain why you probably shouldn't (https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-standalone#when-not-to-use-babelstandalone https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-standalone#when-not-to-use-bab...). All you need is these two scripts: <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.js"></script> <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react@18/umd/react.development.js"></script> [Edit - also need ReactDOM, sorry: <script crossorigin src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@18/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script> ] I think it would help if more react tutorials started from here, because it shows why you need a build process. Here, as a JSFiddle: the React 'Hello World' they don't want you to see: https://jsfiddle.net/smLa1bco/ https://jsfiddle.net/smLa1bco/