> Could you elaborate on that please? Is it impossible to skip Babel when using React Native?

Yes, the React Native packager depends on Babel, and uses a react-native preset. When you start a new project, you get this default .babelrc:

    {
      "presets": [
        "react-native-stage-0"
      ]
    }

They basically wrote their own version of webpack, to solve some performance problems and make development as fast as possible.