What sort of issues are you running into as far as "how an app using Redux works"? For myself, the first thing I usually do when looking at an unfamiliar Redux codebase is to look at the store creation logic, see what middleware packages are being used, and see where the root reducer logic is being imported from. Then, I skim through the reducers to get an understanding of what the state structure is, what kinds of values are being stored, and what some of the reducer operations are.

I'm not sure why you say that "you need 10 packages to load JSON data". Assuming that you're in a browser that supports the Fetch API, you need _no_ additional packages at all. You can make an AJAX call in a connected component, and call `this.props.dispatch({type : "DATA_LOADED", payload : response.data})` in the success handler.

Now, we do encourage people to try moving that logic out of components to make it more reusable, which usually means using thunks. However, redux-thunk is all of 12-ish lines long, and if you'd prefer not to actually add it as a separate package, it can easily be pasted into your app directly. But, you genuinely shouldn't _need_ more packages than that to be making AJAX calls. There's plenty of additional abstractions that are available around making network requests and processing the results, but those are all purely optional.