No, two weeks to take a deep dive into all the associated dependencies for doing a universal SPA. Learning the details of webpack (which requires more googling than reading the documentation), auditioning several flux implementations (and there's relay if you want to go down the graphql rabbit hole), routing libraries, and server page rendering configurations. There's no single way to do this and everybody has their own boilerplate set up on github. You can just get started with one of those, but if you don't understand what's going on under the hood, you'll be up the creek when something breaks and you're on the clock. I'm extremely uncomfortable working with something professionally until I have a good understanding of the source at least at the highest level of abstraction. Unfortunately this seems to be the only way to survive in the NPM ecosystem, pulling down and spending an hour reading the source of every variation of large dependency you might need. Hence the two weeks. Not that it's such a bad way to do things, reading the source. It's just a lot slower than people generally expect web development to take these days.

I don't think so. I'm a somewhat-novice react dev, and for me, even in my first projects, setting stuff up was about a day. It's true though that during the next few weeks you'll have to tweak things while yo start to work on "real code".

I imagine your parent didn't literally spend two whole weeks just on that, but I might be wrong if he's very thorough.

In any case, the configuration of all the parts of the "canonical react stack" (let's not forget, react could be used without all of this junk too) is a pain, but I hope once you get the hang of it you can just reuse and don't think about it so much.

I feel like it's normal for web development

I'd say it's quite high. However, I'd echo that if one is coming at building a boilerplate while simultaneously wanting to learn and understand all of the concepts in the stack, I could see the boilerplate taking more than an hour or two.

(For example, I've seen some that implement some custom Redux middleware simply so that there's a conceptual reference right in the boilerplate as to how one would be done).

Are you thinking of getting into it? I heavily advise checking React out. I think it's fantastic!