Fair points. I haven't played around with create-react-app much - it seems like a great tool, but it's important to note that a) it's pretty new, and b) it was created to address the very issues of what makes React hard to learn. What I'm not sure about is if the abstraction it provides will come back to haunt a beginner. It seems like the developers are anticipating a point where the basic setup is no longer suitable for a project with the "eject" feature, which means at some point you'll have to understand the underlying tool chain. This isn't a bad thing, but again, the learning path isn't clear.

As far as ES2015 syntax, it's not specific to a framework, but it is an extra thing that a beginner has to learn. Nearly every React tutorial I've come across takes heavy advantage of its features. And don't get me wrong - I love the new features and use them in my own code. But it's hard to tell the best way to teach a newcomer nowadays. Skip ES5 and only learn ES2015? That seems like trouble, you won't be able to read many existing codebases. Learn ES5 first, then ES2015? That seems like reasonable, but again, it's hard to get into React right away since you'll have to learn ES5 first. Again, these aren't problems for experienced developers, but it's daunting for a beginner to get started.

You do have a good point about showing specific features of Vue, this post was only trying to show the ease of getting started. I may follow up with a post to show some more specific features of building a larger app.