React's state stuff is just a really basic, batteries-included solution that works for basic things but doesn't really scale. There's nothing special about it i

React's state stuff is just a really basic, batteries-included solution that works for basic things but doesn't really scale. There's nothing special about it in terms of performance. Once you get beyond a certain level of complexity in your app, and need to bring in richer state management, React's mechanisms become dead weight. The one exception being contexts. Contexts allow you to hook into react's virtual DOM and "talk about" a subtree of it instead of just the very next layer down. This is something that an external library can't replicate, so it's more of a fundamental primitive than setState and hooks are.