I mostly agree with this, and I also prefer using functional components whenever possible, but I think there are still situations where the mental model of clas

I mostly agree with this, and I also prefer using functional components whenever possible, but I think there are still situations where the mental model of class components with their lifecycle hooks is a much better fit for a problem, at least for me. These tend to come up rarely, but it'll be things like super imperative side-effect controlling components that, for instance, hook into non-React libraries (3D graphics libs, or 3rd party vanilla JS widgets, for example) via escape hatches. In those scenarios, you're very much in imperative mode, as opposed to declarative mode. Functional components and hooks excel at declarative mode, which most web app code is. Class components with their implicit statefulness and lifecycle hooks model however excel at imperative mode, so when you need that, they are for me the better solution.