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This library is built on the Expo Modules API, which does not require the Expo SDK. It requires the expo package, which ships the module and autolinking infrastructure and little else.
Bare React Native is a supported route, not a footnote. The only thing you give up is the config plugin, because there is no prebuild to run it — so the plist keys and manifest XML are yours to write, and every setup page gives you exactly what to write.

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Install

install-expo-modules adds the expo package, switches the Babel config to babel-preset-expo, and extends metro.config.js from expo/metro-config. Doing it by hand means writing those three things yourself:
babel.config.js
metro.config.js
ios/Podfile
Then npx pod-install.

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Requirements

CoreNFC has existed since iOS 11, so with a 16.4 floor there is no weak linking to arrange and no -weak_framework CoreNFC hack to copy from anywhere.

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Native configuration

Pick the page for what you are building and copy the blocks under Bare React Native:

NDEF

The baseline every project needs.

ISO 7816

Plus the AIDs you select.

FeliCa

Plus the system codes you read.

Background tags

Plus intent filters.
Those blocks are generated from the config plugin and checked in CI, so they are what an Expo project would have got, not a description of it.

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The iOS capability

Editing the entitlements file is not enough on its own. The App ID needs the capability too:
1

Open your App ID

In the Apple Developer portal.
2

Enable Near Field Communication Tag Reading

In the identifier’s capability list.
3

Regenerate the provisioning profile

With “Automatically manage signing” in Xcode this happens for you. With a manually managed profile it does not, and the failure appears at runtime as a session that will not open.

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Verifying autolinking

If the module did not link, every call fails with contractMismatch and a message telling you to rebuild — which is the right answer often enough to be worth checking first.
On Android, a fresh ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug regenerates that list. On iOS, npx pod-install after any dependency change.

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What is not available in a bare project

Only the plugin itself. Everything else — the runtime API, the NDEF codec, the protocol layers, the React hooks — is plain JavaScript and behaves identically.