Some of these extra tools are added because someone wants to display "a blog post" using React and so they think they need all those extra tools for FE.

If there is no need for the level of reactivity that is on the level of facebook style then everything provided by a simple rails new is enough.

But I would say that you kinda need to think about the UX with simplicity in mind or else everything becomes a blog with React because everything can be forced to look like it needs to be reactive and do a lot of unnecessary stuff.