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.