React Native still is and better than ever the toolchain for crossplatform application development. As usual the new version React Native toolchain keeps on changing. The documentation of the toolchain also keeps on changing(they call it evolving, not me).
Starting a new project is now done as this
npx @react-native-community/cli init MyNewReactNativeApp
For a particular version of React Native, the command is like this.
npx @react-native-community/cli init MyApp --version "0.75"
This is basically using the community cli
Currently the official documentation pushes users to use Expo. There is no straight forword way of knowing how to simply use React Native only.