Do I really need Babel or other transpilers to use ES6 with React?

Question

Do I really need Babel or other transpilers to use ES6 in React?

I was looking at the chart https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Seems like my current browser Chrome (latest stable version) supports almost all the ES6 features...

If I can use ES6 without Babel, how I should do it?

Answer 1

If you want to:

• use modules (with require() or import ...)
• use JSX
• support a lot of browsers
• use more advanced features (async/await), some still in proposals (decorators, class properties..)

You must use Babel to be sure that everyone will be able to run your code, else you can develop without it.