Hooks are much better. The only problem with hooks is that people don't get them. But once you get them, every other approach looks like a complicated pile of shit.

I think the dev community does really poorly with these kinds of abstractions that are very simple but completely unintuitive.

I place a lot of the blame on the React team too. When hooks came out, their docs were absolutely terrible. They probably still are. They were full of shitty editorialising like "we created hooks because we found classes were too difficult for people to understand!", which made every dev I worked with feel insecure for not immediately knowing how to write super awesome clean code.