this doesn't make any sense. cra is webpack, but in a way that doesn't blow up every week. you can use react without bundlers, but what is the point. you'll be sitting there, without a dev env, no hot reload, no module resolution, minification, types, jsx, babel, ... any single one of these will get you 1000+ packages on the dev side. none of this is going into the published build of course.

You're right there's no way. CRA isn't React. You can still use React by just adding react and react-dom to a page via two script tags.