[baddox]

What alternative would you propose for a component that genuinely needed all the functionality of that nested HOC example you provided?

The render prop pattern will have just as much nesting. Mixins or plain JavaScript class composition have major well-accepted problems. You could just write one big component with all that functionality, but the fact that it would ever be split into layers of HOCs implies that various functionality is being reused (and probably provided by third party libraries).