Ember still has by far the best out of box experience and guides like this make that point painfully well. With Ember CLI you start at step 1, skip all the build steps (babel, webpack, etc...), and move on to learning the framework and getting some work done.

In the end you'll end up with a framework that already has a story for state management, api interaction, client side routing, and a complete testing story.

I've setup the described React stack many times. I like React as a view management library, but it requires a large amount of duct tape to get working and even once it is I still have to dedicate a lot of time to tweaking and maintaining all of these interconnected build steps. There are still tradeoffs that have made React a great choice some cases (namely its reliance on build duct tape allows it to be retrofitted into larger mature apps), but for apps I want to just work out of the box Ember/Ember CLI is an easy choice.