For most people, trying to learn to "think in React" is a pretty big jump, especially if they're coming from an imperative, jQuery-style background. Throwing in Redux's concepts at the same time is usually too much for most people, especially if they're relatively inexperienced programmers. So, the standard advice from both the React and Redux teams is to focus on learning React first. Once you have a good understanding of how React works, you will better appreciate why a state management library like Redux can be useful, and you can learn about other tools later.
On the other hand, if you are familiar with Redux, it does make a lot of sense to set it up from the beginning. I've been writing a tutorial series called "Practical Redux" ( http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/practical-redux/ ) , which is intended to demonstrate a variety of useful React and Redux techniques in the context of a sample app. In that series, I create a new project using Create-React-App, and then immediately add Redux into it as a baseline.
Overall, what Dan is trying to push back against is the perception that you _must_ use Redux with React, or that you _must_ learn them both at the same time. Neither is true.