I agree that most of the reason to use CRA is to avoid needing to set up a complicated toolchain. However I've mostly stopped using it now in favour of Parcel. That gives you the zero-config of CRA without the weight. As a test, I just tried setting up an absolutely minimal React + TypeScript app. This is what I did:

  mkdir parceldemo
  cd parceldemo
  yarn init
  vi index.html 
  vi index.tsx
  npx parcel index.html

The two index files are here: https://gist.github.com/ascorbic/3b075105b49917975326f1d31b3...

...and I have a working React app, with hot module reloading and TypeScript. Parcel installs TypeScript as a devdependency and react and react-dom as dependencies, and starts the HMR server. It took less than one minute.