I never made any claims about what other tools you _might_ need to build "real world"-ish apps. I'm only saying that you don't actually need anything else, including build setups, to be able to write working React code, because that's a common misunderstanding about React. Folks assume you _have_ to have Webpack and Babel to use it.
Additionally if you find local development unpleasant you can always try remote development via something like https://codesandbox.io/ which will setup a project with everything you need.
