What work you get for free? You can reuse wrapper components... can even tether the route and the wrapper together, so it's easier to manage your route/component mapping...

    <Router ...>
      <DefaultPageLayout path="/" component={DefaultPage} />
      ...

So the templating benefits to html/jquery are a bit of a mixed bag, and if you're doing React + Node, you can start off with your fallback route being the app, and later add server-side rendering if in a time crunch.

I will say the initial setup can be higher, if you don't like the structure of create-react-app, but most people new to react coming from a PHP and Angular background probably should stick closer to as it comes in the box. Wiring up redux is the biggest paradigm shift though... unidirectional workflows mean much better predictability in terms of state with far fewer bugs. Most of the times I see weird state issues in websites/apps lately they're angular 1 though.