If you work with React a lot, you can setup a React project to your taste in about 30 minutes. But the catch being if you leave React for a while then come back, all bets are off.
I think most boilerplates add way too much and are overly opinionated. I like that this is simple, and "eject" gives power users an even better starting point.
The problem is not really being overly opinionated. It's being unnecessarily opinionated.
React Starter Kit comes with GraphQL as its API layer. I love GraphQL, and have written tons of it when writing Relay code, but I wouldn't ever expect someone getting up to speed on React to use it.
You have to limit the number of things you throw at newcomers.
Totally. My first React setup took me two days to get right. Now, starting a new project is a 5 minute exercise in CLI autocomplete that has me wishing npmjs downloads were faster. It's surreal to think that for any popular technology, there will always be newcomers, no matter how long that technology has been around. I would write up my process in a blog post, but I'm sure that that has already been written several times.
Going back over my old projects and finding four different flux implementations, that is a new and interesting kind of suffering. The crazy thing is, I never even liked flux in any of its forms. What I really want, is pouchdb / couchdb, but even that is not perfect, and my team has no problem poking holes in weird ideas.
Right now, I'm going through the Om.next tut series, and it is pretty awesome so far. I think I'm going to pass on datascript, though. This is total skunkworks though, if people at work found out that was using clojurescript on the front end, they would be very concerned about me.
The killer feature for Om.next, imo, is using a reader function to define the relationship between a component and the one application state atom. Combine that with an identifying function that associates a component with a field in the application state, and you enable the framework to make very precise component updates.
I think most boilerplates add way too much and are overly opinionated. I like that this is simple, and "eject" gives power users an even better starting point.