Sanctum and React

I've got an app I wrote a few years ago using Laravel that I'm looking to utilize to expand my knowledge. The goal here is to convert the front end into a separate React app, while still utilizing the back end PHP API.

I'm trying to understand how Sanctum works and what the best way to move forward with it is. The way I understood the documentation, was that after successfully logging in, so long as the XSRF token is in the header, the user is authenticated. Is that right? Or am I misunderstanding?

I've seen tutorial's about how to use Sanctum with the tokens, but honestly if I don't have to store tokens, that'd be great. Any advice/notes/tutorials that you could point me to, I'd really appreciate it.