[philihp]

Exactly this. If you're just starting out, just do a simple page with only React.

Very quickly you'll find there are problems with managing your page lifecycle, and you might imagine a good solution to it. That solution probably looks a lot like Redux.

Then you might want some unit testing of your React components. Woo, that too has also has a satisfactory answer with Enzyme.

Slowly, you will add more and more to your toolkit. Before you know it, you have scaled the frontend ivory tower.

There is a rationale for all of this, but you shouldn't feel obligated to use any of it. You can save yourself a lot of headache down the line by starting with a project like React Boilerplate. Maybe you don't need 70% of the things in it? That's cool. Just start with it, build up the bits that you need using just 30% of it. Then maybe later, you want another 10% of it... it's already there, configured, and ready for you to use.