Agreed, for those of us on Windows, the assumption that Node/NPM folks make that we'll have Python installed on our machines by default is not very nice.

Hooks, I agree, those take a while to get used to. Once you do though, the code is so much cleaner than doing it based off of the lifecycle. And yeah, functional components make calling .render() unnecessary, the component _is_ the function.

React would be in contention if I too was working on a server-side rendered (Isomorphic) app. There would be others in the running too. Though for a purely user-browser driven UI, I still think React is far and away better than the alternatives, at least for right now.