[ralusek]

In practice, because they don't work the way most people think they work, and because it's really easy to screw up using them.

Hooks are called every render, which is a relatively transparent process that happens all of the time. All hooks have to be called every render, otherwise you're breaking the rules of hooks. The reason why is because the only way hooks know which hook they even are, is the order in which you call them.

For example, if I have

    const a = useRef(true);
    const b = useRef(false);

The only way react knows that the first value it should return the next time it renders is what I'm expecting to be value `a` is because that useRef is called first every render. These are all kinds of rules and assumptions about hooks that make them not behave at all like normal functions. I don't think people understand that, for useRef, for example, those two lines of code are run every render, passing in the initial starting values, which then react disregards after the initial render, and maintains a mapping of ref and state and memo etc values all by the order the hooks are called in. I see people use hooks in callbacks all of the time and just fundamentally not understand that they're doing it wrong.

Then there are all of the closure problems with useEffect and useCallback that I see people really struggle with.

And useState...lordie. The fact that it defers setting the state value, whereas useRef will immediately have its value updated. Deferring useState has caused so many bugs.