I don't think new paradigms are a bad thing, I think the problem with hooks is that they are a "clever trick" to work around the fact that the language/runtime

I don't think new paradigms are a bad thing, I think the problem with hooks is that they are a "clever trick" to work around the fact that the language/runtime does not have the necessary features to support the developer experience that they would ideally have. What's sad is that the class-based component system did have those necessary features, it also had a nice distinction between components and their lifecycle and the rest of your code. Now with hooks, everything is React lifecycle code, unless you're really smart about your API boundaries, and in my experience no one makes good re-usable hooks that are nicely isolated from business logic.