netlify-cms-react-starter | starter project for creating lightning | Content Management System library

I have a react.js app, and I'd like to add the netlify CMS backend. I followed the setup tutorial here : https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/add-to-your-site/ but when I navigate to mysite/admin I just get my site. I changed around my react-router, and netlify _redirect file, and tried putting the script tags in the body, like this repo did: https://github.com/Jinksi/netlify-cms-react-starter, but now I just get a white screen. Jinksi seems to have gone to great lengths to make this work, using helmet, etc. On the netlifyCMS site there are examples for using Gatsby, etc, but none that use pure react. Is there an easy way to do this at this point in time? Or should I re-write my website using Gatsby.js?