I find dependency arrays to be neither intuitive or easy to debug. When you're missing a parameter or use the wrong one React can emit some pretty weird side effects that are hard to track down back to the dependency array.

I generally like shaping my components as functions first and use hooks because I have to in order to do this but definitely not because I find them easier to understand than component lifecycle methods (even if they may be less verbose).

To me, hooks are the ugly part, writing component as a single function is the part that makes it worth it.