Perhaps React is just as complex as it needs to be solve the problems it tries to solve. Is that a true statement? Probably not. Close to true? Maybe.

Whatever the case, just because we wish solutions to those problems were easier to understand doesn't mean reality owes us that. I suspect React in particular, being in the web dev space, has a lot of people working with it who have very little CS background. Because they don't understand how React works under the hood or even above the hood is "something wrong with React"? I'm not sure I buy it.

I've seen a lot of really poor React code that breaks all kinds of best practices, many of them explicitly laid out in the docs. Even before hooks came along. In fact it's been hard to find examples of people who understand the dom well, much less React. I will continue to suspect there's something wrong with most of the people using React, not React itself, which from my perspective has only become better over time.