[andrewingram]

That's why a number of people (myself included) advocate for overzealous/defensive use of useMemo/useCallback as a means of ensuring that a prop changing is always meaningful. The rationale is summarised here: https://www.zhenghao.io/posts/memo-or-not

There are good reasons for _not_ doing this, since using these hooks isn't free; and technically speaking useMemo isn't an identity guarantee (though it currently behaves as one), but I haven't experienced any of the common useEffect pitfalls since adopting this methodology a couple of years ago.

But as my sibling comment points out, a lot of the need for this defensive coding would go away if there were more ways of defining equivalence. I hope that one day the record and tuple proposals land, which should help a bit. But i'd also like to see something like Python's __eq__ and __hash__ in JavaScript too - perhaps done in a similar way to [Symbol.iterator].