This was not the only design possible. The main problem with lifecycle methods was that you couldn't have multiple of them. There is absolutely nothing about th

This was not the only design possible. The main problem with lifecycle methods was that you couldn't have multiple of them. There is absolutely nothing about the design of React that necessitated hooks to fix that issue. You could have this API this.addListener('mount', () => { // do things on mount // return cleanup to be called on unmount return () => cleanup() }) called from the constructur of a component. With this you could setup multiple listeners and make sure they're all cleaned up. But no, the syntax wasn't "clean" (you'd pass `this` as an argument to the "custom hooks" equivalent"), so instead we got this error-prone order-dependent design that doesn't allow conditional execution and runs on every render.