[mrblueblue]

The "anti-pattern" patterns that you can use to build your React app are usually the "imperative escape hatches" the post is referring to.

They are part of the framework to allow developers not familiar with functional and declarative ways of doing things to get stuff done

I believe its part of the React team's long-term goal to educate framework adopters about the proper patterns and to slowly phase out these escape hatches.

[danabramov]

It is indeed a part of our strategy. We can’t just tell everyone to go functional. We are making mistakes and learning together with our users, and we are phasing our patterns when we are confident that the better patterns are accessible and we see that people can use them efficiently without extensive training.