Currently they use console.error(), which overestimates their severity and causes devs to react more strongly than the message might imply.
Example:
warning.js:45
Warning: Failed propType: Invalid prop `things` of type `array` supplied to `Item`, expected `object`. Check the render method of `Connect(Item)`.
Thanks for the feedback but this is intentional. console.error
provides good stack traces and our treatment of warnings is that they _should_ be fixed before they are committed and shipped. With maybe 1 exception, I think they should all be fixable.
One of the things we're working towards is a better way to manage these so that you can silence specific warnings or types of warnings without having to fork React. You can track that in the umbrella issue - https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/5306