I think you’ll find it quite refreshing to use React A) with a JSX-like syntax, and B) without any kind of build tooling.
Refreshing indeed:
It’s not really the React that’s the hard part to pull off without build tools (although I do wonder what we lose from not tree shaking), it’s the JSX. I’m so used to JSX I think it would be hard for me to work on a front-end JavaScript project without it. But I know some people literally prefer a render function instead. If that’s the case, you could use React.createComponent directly and skip the JSX, or in the case of Preact, use h:
I work on a project that uses Mithril for the JavaScript templating which is a bit like that, and it’s not my favorite syntax, but you totally get used to it (and it’s fast):
