You know, i'm not even sure that hooks were worth all of the problems with maintainability and readability that they've caused.

I don't have the slightest doubts about me being in the minority here, but i've seen a large amount of projects which attempt to use multiple state hooks per component, and as a consequence the dependency arrays become brittle as the code is changed and sooner or later you're stuck with your page being in an endless rendering loop, because your logic isn't clever enough to actually untangle all of the state to decide when it needs to change anything:

  useEffect(() => {
   ... // a whole bunch of code
  }, [foo, bar]);
  
  useEffect(() => {
   ... // a whole bunch of code
  }, [bar, baz]);
  
  useEffect(() => {
   ... // a whole bunch of code
  }, [foo, bar, baz]);

Sure, you can be responsible with that stuff when you're the one writing the code, but when you open up someone else's project and have "the business" breathing down on your neck but have to untangle their uncommented code, you feel like some of the features are footguns in disguise. At least with shouldComponentUpdate all of the code that decides whether something should be done was in one place.

You could easily comment that code out or change it. But with hooks, you need to untangle how all of the related calls to setState work and where every method for every state hook is called and why. I'm not sure that it was a good idea to decouple those.