[onion2k]

The old class based way of doing things was much more explicit.

They weren't though. They looked explicit, but what was actually happening wasn't what appeared to be happening. Dn Abramov wrote a good blog post about the subtle bugs that can sneak into class components - https://overreacted.io/how-are-function-components-different...

At least, hooks should take some kind of "context" and "name" parameters so that they are in spirit a pure function. Then you could also call them in loops and if blocks without problems.

Dan also addressed a lot of the 'why are hooks like that?' questions in another post that goes into some of the designs the React team rejected. https://overreacted.io/why-do-hooks-rely-on-call-order/

Hooks can be hard to reason about but they make code a bit less error prone because when they don't work they fail completely. Classes don't. Classes work most of the time. That is so much worse.