Thanks for taking the time to respond, appreciate it. If you don't mind, I'll dissect a couple of your thoughts. Your arguments stand on two things: you and seniority. The former is an issue because stating that you understand something, you see the value in something and you have the answer to using hooks the right way does not make it universally true. The latter is an issue because React was and still is sold as a very beginner-friendly library. Only to then point the finger at those exact same beginners is arrogant. This is a culture problem in web development and I see it all too often. Since when is it OK to create libraries that make building a 3 tab single page app/site as dangerous as fire, and since when do you need years of seniority to do that? In an industry that's struggling to get talent into the talent-pool, this is what we're promoting? That there's nothing wrong with the tools, let's blame all the developers? I really don't want us to go down that route. React was by far more accessible before hooks to everyone who had even the basic concepts of OOP figured out. Hooks on the other hand is much more geared towards FP. What I think we ought to do is accept that for some people OOP sounds natural, while for others FP makes a lot more sense, and then maybe, just maybe we can have a conversation around what's really "better" and what isn't.

P.S. I would refrain comparing React to anything else. Making the assumption that most developers are fluent in something else other than JS, is a huge assumption that leads to even more friction. In my experience explanation through comparison always backfires.