For a good while I thought I was the only one who is against hooks. It's good to see there are two of us. By the looks of the other comments here, maybe even three.
I fully expect that in a few years React will be widely seen as a J2EE-like poster child of over-engineering shark jumping for the functional paradigm. I already do.
I pretty much stopped paying attention to new versions after React 14.
KISS - keep it stupid simple.
I suspect that some Devs new to JS didn't like the various definitions of "this", and Hooks was supposed to help them out.
No, stale closures caused by hooks are more confusing than what "this" has ever been, especially since this-related problems are mitigated with fat arrows and class property assignment. No, as far as I understand, the driving force behind the hooks was the vision of the coming concurrent mode, for which class components posed some difficult problems somehow.