I ran into this recently myself. I've been doing web development my whole career, but I never got into the complicated toolchain side of it. I just used a vanilla html/javascript setup and I would build out my own tools or manually include existing libraries as I needed them (no webpack, etc.)

Then it came time to learn React and pretty much every tutorial out there requires a twisted combination of npm, webpack, babel, etc. just to get a simple page running. I just about gave up.

Then I realized that you can run React without any of that stuff by just copying the first section of sample code from this page: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html

So I started with that and built out my own simple framework. As I became more familiar with React and how it interacted with my own homemade framework, I was able to understand where all of the other pieces fit in, and gradually I've been including some third party tools that previously seemed insanely complicated to me (note: the toolchains still seem needlessly complicated, but at least I can generally get things to work now).