[bern4444]

I disagree that hooks increase the API surface. They decrease the React API.

Before hooks, if you wanted a stateful component you had to use class components with all of their specific methods (didMount, didUpdate, shouldUpdate, render etc).

Hooks allow functional components to have state, and a functional component in and of itself has an even smaller API than the class. The React API vastly decreases. A single hook, useEffect, replaces at least 3 methods (didMount, didUpdate, willUnmount) that previously had to written out separately in class components. Each of those methods had to contain logic for ALL your state and side effects so they could very easily grow in scope and be responsible for handling many things.

Now each individual concern can be packaged up in its own useEffect call. If I have state that is relevant to the useEffect call, than I just build my own custom hook that binds the stateful data with the useEffect.

Because hooks are just functions built up from other hooks, I'm no longer constrained by the React API (its effectively gone) and I can so much more easily the abstractions I need that can be shared across components.