[eyelidlessness]

Judging by some of their actual expressed feelings about using hooks, there is definitely a subset of React devs who are definitely experiencing months or more of hell. The React team is, admirably, actively working on a next version of docs to help address this. The fact that the docs project is hooks-first is both a testament to how radically React itself has changed over recent years, but also at least a smell that hooks themselves may be inherently a pain point.

Speaking for myself, I’ve only used them a few times, but I’ve found footguns in even very simple usage. Not months of hell, but definitely propositionalToleranceForHell < actualHell. And sure maybe that’s lack of experience with hooks specifically, but they have nearly-totally-whitespace-and-punctuation-diff equivalents which are nowhere near as complex to actually use effectively.

[Flankk]

Hook are worse than lifecycle methods, they are difficult to understand, and they are not elegant. When you run into trouble, it is your mental model to blame. You are told to learn to think in hooks, which is to say, to do things in an unintuitive way. That is a heavy price to pay for composability.