>Yes but higher order components as you call them, seem to be an abstraction that you would only use because the base unit of organization is a React component.
I don’t really see the issue here. “How do you parameterize Y by X?” “Create a function that takes X and returns Y.” Doesn’t really seem React-specific.
The unit of organization is indeed the component. Again, I’m not sure I understand why it being a first-class thing indicates a deficiency. By this logic, functions are deficient in JavaScript because you can pass a function to [].map(), or Promises are deficient because you can resolve() a Promise to another Promise.
I think the opposite is true. The abstractions are more powerful when they afford building higher level abstractions on top of them. Obviously you shouldn’t overuse this, just like you shouldn’t overuse higher order functions, but it’s a nice property to have.