I’m having a hard time understanding what problems this (and hooks in general) really solve. Why should I use the axios hooks over just using axios directly?
Part of the goal with hooks is to give a way to abstract away the details of how you must interact with the React, without resorting to burying your view-components under 10 layers of controller-components.
Functions work better if you can call them because you can more easily select and add them ala carte and pass individual different specific parameters to each one whereas with inheritance you get one call to super (and advanced react components already extend a class further complicating super calls).
So it is best for one behavior having to only add something in one place to use that behavior. The class model fails because some behavior goes into ComponentDidMount and others go into ComponentWillUnmount and so on.
Hooks solve that. Everything required can be trvially bundled into one thing in one function call.
At first glance the biggest weakness I see for them is that they a bit too magical and that they operate at bit more dynamically than I think would be ideal. They rely on functions being called in the same order and waiting until functions are called for the first time, which seems like the opposite of “declarative”.
Having said that I’ve used them a bit and really like how much they cut down in boilerplate I just wish we had a something that felt a bit more like first class language supported (even if that support requires patching in something like jsx) I just don’t know how that would look or if it would look any different. It just feels like this is scratching deeper itch than just a react only problem but I can’t quite explain how (and maybe I am mistaken for that hunch). Maybe a more expressive language like a lisp would offer a hint at the solution.
Dan's blog post is much better, in comparison. Start with that maybe.
Let's say you used Axios directly in your components. That means every component needs to (1) set up its own state to track the request status (like whether it's loading, errored, the latest payload, etc.) and (2) set up its lifecycle hooks to kick off the request at the appropriate times, update the component's state, etc.
Do this a few times and you'll notice things becoming very repetitive. So naturally you look for a way to factor that out.
A higher-order component (basically a function that generates a component with all that boilerplate) is one option. Another option is what you see here – Hooks.