[hliyan]

I thought React was designed specifically so you won't have to buy into the entire stack (unlike Ember and friends). I've used React components without ES6, using plain old jQuery and AJAX calls during component mount (and nothing else). I didn't feel any particular temptation to add more things. Okay I'm lying :) . It's tempting, but it's possible to do without.

[CircleJerk]

You weren't using JSX?

[hliyan]

I did. It's part of React proper and merely syntactic sugar over React.DOM calls. You can use React.DOM directly, but it doesn't really change your level of investment in the 'stack', IMO.