Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
A lot of lifecycle + server side rendering changes are occurring in React 16. It would be nice to have a branch of RNW that builds towards those changes (and is a breaking version change that supports react: ^0.16)
Describe alternatives you've considered
It is hard to do stuff like render = React.version.minor >= 16 ? ReactDom.hydrate : ReactDom.render
Additional context
A sep branch would be nice because the changes of all component lifecycles to the new approach I'm sure will take time, and need to trace changes to the master branch
[Edit]
I realized that you swap hydrate for render based on process.env.NODE_ENV. Maybe for the time being would you consider allowing to pass in a renderFn so users can default to hydrate?
Related Warning:

Link to the changes?
https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/27/update-on-async-rendering.html
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that some of our legacy component lifecycles tend to encourage unsafe coding practices. They are:
16.3: Introduce aliases for the unsafe lifecycles, UNSAFE_componentWillMount, UNSAFE_componentWillReceiveProps, and UNSAFE_componentWillUpdate. (Both the old lifecycle names and the new aliases will work in this release.)
A future 16.x release: Enable deprecation warning for componentWillMount, componentWillReceiveProps, and componentWillUpdate. (Both the old lifecycle names and the new aliases will work in this release, but the old names will log a DEV-mode warning.)
17.0: Remove componentWillMount, componentWillReceiveProps, and componentWillUpdate . (Only the new “UNSAFE_” lifecycle names will work from this point forward.)
Oh I thought it was something new. I'm aware of this, thanks. I don't think a branch is necessary
@necolas are your intentions to address these deprecations within #1172 or somewhere else? Are you interested in me opening a PR adding the UNSAFE_ prefix to suppress the current warnings from using RNW with React >=16.9.0?
Most helpful comment
@necolas are your intentions to address these deprecations within #1172 or somewhere else? Are you interested in me opening a PR adding the
UNSAFE_prefix to suppress the current warnings from using RNW with React>=16.9.0?