Hooks allow for declarative behaviour that’s harder to model other ways. With hooks, something like declaring when an event listener should be in play becomes much cleaner. The alternatives with class components are messy.

The above criticism that you don’t get to have pure functional components anymore doesn’t really make sense to me - either you have some lingering state to deal with, or you write a pure function. Your hand is forced by the problem. You could switch over to class components but they’re really not much clearer to read.

Most of the bugs I’ve seen have been around JavaScript’s crummy equality checks and the need for more memoisation.

The problem wasn't the fact that components were classes. The problems were the React lifecycle methods. People did some crazy things with instance variables, shouldComponentUpdate, and componentDidUpdate, and especially the deprecated componentWillReceiveProps.

I found class components really....wordy binding this to this all the time and lifecycle methods could become kinda wild after a while doing all these checks for a bunch of things...and imo that just trended towards these bulky spaghetti class components / lifecycle methods.

I think the use of classes was just some sugar to help OO and Java people (like myself) into React components. They're not really classes in the useful sense, and I found my components littered with functions that returned blobs of JSX that felt too small to be factored into full "classes".

Smaller function components and then adding state with `useState` has simplified my code.