[baddox]

I would question the premise. I consider myself fairly plugged into the professional React community on Twitter, and I have several years of React experience myself, and my impression has not been that experienced React programmers have a difficult time understanding hooks.

[rimunroe]

Same. Most of the devs I know personally were immediately convinced and loved the API. I assume the usual feedback bias is at play here.

Folks who are into hooks probably talked to friends/coworkers excitedly about them, but have a lot less reason to broadcast their feelings about it than people who had complaints. I don't think any of the people I know who were into them did anything more than than thumbsup the RFC or like/retweet some tweets--if they even did anything public at all--even though we all followed the discussions. Personally I didn't want to add to the noise with a comment which would basically be "Yeah this looks fantastic, and all these alternative APIs being suggested seem clearly worse."

People who don't like hooks spent a lot of time writing about their issues with them and what they'd like to hear instead. I wish I could get that type of feedback on everything I wrote, I just wouldn't want to deal with that immense volume.