I recently started working with 1.3 and quickly ran into problems with trying to use the react-runtime package from MDG and React components off of NPM, so I wrote these two wrapper packages that act like react and react-runtime, but they actually just load whatever React is installed via NPM in your project.
In order to use it you just need to NPM install react and reactDOM, and then copy the two folders found in the above repo to your packages folder.