That's correct. In most cases React is used with client side tools `webpack`, `create-react-app` etc and all of these depend on Babel.

There is a Babel Standalone file that works when used directly on a page but it's huge 1.5 MB of JS so and it takes many seconds to process.

The `jsxLoader.js` file I created uses Babel Standalone for old browsers (IE 11) and then for modern browsers it transforms JSX to JS very quickly without the need for Babel.