As we can read in official docs:
Create React App
Create React App is a comfortable environment for learning React, and
is the best way to start building a new single-page application in
React.It sets up your development environment so that you can use the latest
JavaScript features, provides a nice developer experience, and
optimizes your app for production. You’ll need to have Node >= 14.0.0
and npm >= 5.6 on your machine.
So these are requirements that you must meet and it seems that it cannot be avoided that way .