[WorldMaker]

One view of Hooks is that they are monadic or at least Monad-like and the deps arrays are a crude (reversed) notation for algebraic side effects. ("Reversed" because they declare which dependencies have side effects more than they declare which side effects the hooks themselves produce.)

It's still so very functional programming-inspired, even if the execution engine (scheduler/dispatcher) isn't that much like the Monad runtimes of most functional programming languages and the various Hook "monads" don't get captured in even the return type of functions (much less the parameter types) and get elided away. (It could be more "traditionally JS monadic" if it [ab]used async/await syntax and needed some fancy return type, even though the concepts for hooks don't involve Promises [or Futures, being the slightly more common FP Monad name]. Though also, from Typescript patch notes, I've heard React is exploring [ab]using Promises for something like that in the near-ish future.)

Monadic bindings needing to be in-order, just the like "Hook rules", isn't even that strange from an FP perspective: there can be a big difference in which of two Promises is awaited first. There can be a big difference in which IO binding executes first (you don't want to input something before the prompt of what to input is printed).