Ending up with HoC on top of HoC is also an extremely salient point. While it's not strictly required, the structure of larger React projects highly encourages

Ending up with HoC on top of HoC is also an extremely salient point. While it's not strictly required, the structure of larger React projects highly encourages you to create or use non-visual higher order components to manage connections to state stores, APIs etc - or make use of the Context API to achieve the same result. In both cases, you end up with non-UI wrapper components to provide the plumbing in a tree of components that would ideally be entirely presentational. That leads in turn to trying to separate presentational vs. container components, trying to avoid nesting any kind of container component within a pure presentational component to keep it easily testable, creating more HoCs in an attempt to separate concerns, etc. I certainly wouldn't describe React as garbage like the OP - but I think whether it's the best choice is heavily dependent on the kind of app you're building. The design choices it has made comes with significant challenges and trade-offs and we should not pretend otherwise.