You can't really code in React professionally if you ignore all the tooling around it, the pipelines , the JSX, the flux/redux/... and all that stuffs. It's like saying "C is pretty simple if you ignore gcc macros,make, autoconf, automake, autogen, pkg-config, ld , and all that stuff". You cant. All these dependencies are necessary and managing them constitute at least half the amount of time spent working with C. Same thing with React.

So you pretty much end up with the same level of complexity as more complicated solutions in the real world context.