Because React performs many code transformations, it is imperative that our local environments have NodeJS and a few other packages preinstalled (babel, webpack, etc).

Assuming these packages are pre-installed, we can create our own custom task runners that will analyze our React code, transform it and "build" it. However, it easy enough to utilize Create React App to do the grunt work of pre-installing all the task runners for us.

Using create-react-app, we are able to do everything codesandbox allows us to do, but in our local machines.