I am disappointed with the React team’s decision to push functional components and hooks as the standard way of working with React. Not sure if the reason is to make React more approachable to newcomers or not, but in my experience leveraging the power of the component lifecycle through class components and decorators is the most fool-proof way to build and maintain large applications. Particularly leveraging shouldCompomentUpdate for performance and componentDidMount/componentsWillUnmount for registering and disposing of component dependencies is very easy to reason about and scale.