I have created some projects using create-react-app-typescipt, and would like to get rid of babel as a dependency.

From #394 I have understood that babel is not (meant to be?) used in this project at all. However, this package seems to have dependencies on "babel-jest", "babel-loader" and "babel-preset-react-app", which cause "babel-core" and all its subdependencies to be included. I understand that babel is an ES2015+ transpiler and should therefore have no real use in a pure TypeScript project, or having a dependency on it should at most be optional.

I did a quick experiment to see if babel is really required, and turns out you can indeed create a new react app and get away with removing almost all babel-related packages (by hand) from node_modules and keep a working setup.

For some reason npm start command still requires these 4 babel modules to be present:

babel-code-frame
babel-loader
babel-preset-react-app
babel-runtime

npm run test probably requires more.

What is going on here?