Also, many of the concepts you need to learn for proficient react development are auxiliary to react and could be applied to vanilla JS or really any UI framework. Any UI is fundamentally a state machine, and solutions to implementing it all require state management and clean separation of the presentation and data layers.
https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/blob/master/pac...
The README included on a project generated through CRA is 116KB. A screenshot of that page rendered in GitHub is 60054px tall.
Honestly, I don't know if this could be made simpler or easier. React and its ecosystem deal with complex problems that can't always be reduced to simple explanations. In the case of this README, of course a lot of it is about specific setups that most beginners don't need to care about, but that CRA, being the blessed point of entry, still should support, or it would lock everyone into a Facebook workflow.
I think many developers would be better served by entering frontend development not through React, but through the basics (HTML, CSS, JS) and other ecosystems.
[0]: Unrequested opinion: frontend developers reach for bigCo solutions — whatever Facebook/Google/some billion-dollar startup uses — when smaller, lesser known, "boring" or exploratory solutions could be better, trying to solve problems they don't have.
Maybe React itself, but everything else that goes into doing react development; design patterns, gotchas, testing, webpack, native and so on? That takes far longer than a day, and is what most would expect when being able to really say they "know react".