I’m with you. They’re confusing. The magic is too high. They maintain state in an invisible way. The abstractions are hard to follow, especially when you roll

I’m with you. They’re confusing. The magic is too high. They maintain state in an invisible way. The abstractions are hard to follow, especially when you roll your own. The key issue for me is that they hide the rendering lifecycle from you. Everything’s implied. One of the complaints with classes was that you had to learn the arcane weirdness of the lifecycle. But a) it’s not that weird and b) it’s much easier to learn when the callbacks are named after the stage in the lifecycle. The hooks way makes all that invisible. That said, I’m quite fond of the ‘[value, setter]’ return type from useState. It’s nice to use and nice to write. Just don’t ask me to explain how it works for multiple re renders.