AEM Project Archetype - simple starting point or basis for starting an aem project.
And it will be provided with good best practices and basic standards to easily start your implementation.
The archetype is very flexible and can be customized to your needs using several options.
All modules created are to organize dependencies in better way and have clean separation of package deployment.
Coming to your question- Do we need AEM Archtype project as mandatory - Answer - No.
But - can you please give more details about - what you are not able to achieve with Archtype?
following the steps to map the aem components from react but we are not able to achieve it. - are you getting any errors? what functionality you are not able to achieve ? - These details will help to resolve the issue