Thanks for checking out SS4, I'm very keen to hear more feedback like this. Sorry for the late response, it's hard to balance SS4 dev with community engagement sometimes - so much to do! :)
> I had trouble properly requiring jQuery as an external dependency
Just to be clear, there's no need to use the SS4 build tooling for your own project code or modules, unless they add CMS UI functionality. You can base your own project build toolchain on NPM of course, but that should pull in jQuery separately. There's a small amount of SS form fields which might pull in their own dependencies that you could use on your own website (e.g. DateField.js), although I don't think they're widely used. If you still think you have a use case for pulling in the core jQuery NPM dependency, we've documented the necessary
browserify external() use. I've tried to clarify the intended use a bit in a
docs pull request.
It's a bit hard to keep docs relevant and straightforward since we'll still have Entwine/PJAX code in 4.0 stable, sitting alongside ReactJS.
We've tried to mark these docs as deprecated where possible. Let us know if there's any places where you think this should be clearer.
The docs referring to ReactJS are a bit scattered, there's different learning paths where you need varying levels of details: