[tshaddox]

It's also been well over 3 years of myself and many, many other people and teams competently building extensive web apps with React and hooks, so it's not super clear to me in what sense these people "still don't understand how to use them."

There are many reasonable criticisms of hooks, like 1) some people have a strong personal distaste for them, 2) some educators say they're difficult to teach to newcomers, and 3) many people who use them don't have a deep understanding of how they work and how to handle some of the "gotchas." But none of them lead me to conclude that people "still don't understand how to use them."