You don't have to use hooks and class declaration syntax is not going away. If you don't like a paradigm, you don't have to use it. I was quite skeptical of hoo

You don't have to use hooks and class declaration syntax is not going away. If you don't like a paradigm, you don't have to use it. I was quite skeptical of hooks at first, but after using them for a bit, they grew on me. It is not as simple as the class-based approach, but I also haven't found it to be a giant mental leap: my "warming up" to hooks took about a week.