You're more than welcome to use XHR however you see fit. We don't dictate that choice. For many that will mean `$.ajax` - React plays nicely with jQuery (so long as you don't modify the DOM out from under us). For others that might mean a thin library that does that the same thing.
I'm actually not sure. In a side project I'm building with React, we have been using jQuery (Zepto, actually) for XHR only and it would be nice to get rid of it completely.