Fair enough. Though, the first question is - why does the component do so many things? Do they all need to be in a single component or can you break them apart?

For the cases when this is not possible, I agree, useEffect works better than classes lifecycle methods. But do you really want a system which caters to a small percent of use-cases at the expense of readability in others? And the improvement, to my eyes, is not that big anyway.

The hooks are my main gripe with React, but as the OP, I don't see a better alternative either - at least not one that would be worth a rewrite.