[karatestomp]

How objects work: there's a lookup table for methods and properties associated with your instance to find them by name (or call signature, or whatever).

How hooks work: there's a lookup array associated with your instance (yes, an instance of an object—read the code if you're skeptical, and besides functions are objects in JS anyway so even if I'm wrong, which I'm not, I'm technically right) to find properties and methods by reference order(!?!)

Hooks are just a crippled implementation of objects with weird syntax. In a language that already has non-crippled ones built in with less-weird syntax.

[golergka]

So, closures are indeed poor man's objects.

[karatestomp]

It's storing all the hooked-in functions (methods) and variables (properties) outside the function and associating them with the relevant React view object instance at run-time, which is effectively the hooks' "this". Unless the code's change substantially and in very fundamental ways since it was introduced. It doesn't bring to mind closures, at least as I read it. It very much brings to mind object/class-system implementations.