[imtringued]

Hooks have very little to do with closures.

The key aspect of hooks is that what you are doing is something like this:

function(context) { context.useState() }

Where context is a variable that stores all the hook related data, except in reality that variable is a hidden global variable and useState() accesses that variable internally.

Yeah, they added hooks as global functions so that they look like a "cute" DSL. It saves you the effort to type c.useState instead of useState I guess.

The above code is just for illustrative purposes to get the idea across, according to other commenters the internal implementation has changed from what I remember, but the principle is still the same. Global functions demand global state.