For the specific point about useState, I agree about it being too magical. These days when I do write frontend code I use Reagent in Clojurescript. (I use Cloju

For the specific point about useState, I agree about it being too magical. These days when I do write frontend code I use Reagent in Clojurescript. (I use Clojurescript partly for other reasons like its elegant syntax that's better than JSX, and built-in immutable data structures.) Its implementation of (r/atom) is a whole lot more intuitive: you can even think of it as a mutable pointer where the dereferences are tracked. On the other hand useState just feels like a hack for people who really want to avoid writing both classes and closures, and it is a roundabout way of doing things that could have been done in a much more standard and familiar way.