Exactly! I could not put it better. All the talk about side-effects. Hooks make side effects more confusing, not less, for the reasons you perfectly explained.

Exactly! I could not put it better. All the talk about side-effects. Hooks make side effects more confusing, not less, for the reasons you perfectly explained. Small rant ahead. Disclaimer: I find React very useful, just not this constant churn of approaches. One solution would be to make all state pass through a single point (like Elm or Redux) but some people do not like this because it "limits" them. Limiting side-effects lowers cognitive load, same as Type systems are usually not Turing-complete. Limits can be good. Same with Context, which is practical because you can write things from anywhere. Congratulations, we were concerned about side-effects and now we are basically using a global variable. It is like some people talk about side-effects and functional programming and they think it involves using map and filter and done and they don't think deeper about what it means, and see no contradiction in it where it contradicts the principles they are promoting.