In my experience most of my state in contexts changes infrequently (auth information, or the “current client” for a dashboard, or whatever), and then local state is sufficient for the rest. The few times I have sufficiently complexity in the “middle” I indeed have been annoyed and had to be careful to avoid over-frequent rerenders.

It’s just rare enough that “prefer contexts” is a good rule. Simpler, easier to understand code, with no Redux nonsense.