Yes. There's a continuum of routing needs in React apps. If you're not strictly an SPA, you don't need it at all; the browser already does it for you. For a lot of straightforward SPAs, the most basic "display this component based on current tab" works. Past that, a "real router" is just a small piece of code that looks at window.location to decide which component to render, and a Link that knows how to use the history API.

I don't understand why people bloody their foreheads on react-router. The thing it is doing is simple enough to re-do by hand in any application.

You see the same thing with flux implementations: flux libraries change rapidly, because there's not that much to the underlying concept and it's easy to mess with them. But most apps probably don't need flux at all.