Like many others are hinting, you’re trying to learn the entire ecosystem of web dev, which is vast, in a haphazard way. A lot of tutorials and guides out there are terrible. They fail to teach the basics of web dev before teaching the abstractions. It takes learning both, just as learning geometry out of context is boring and inapplicable but learning how light waves work without understanding the math to talk about is probably difficult.

What I also recommend to others now is to skip the complexity of the front end ecosystem, and learn how the web operates from a server side point of view.

If you truly want to stick with react, I’d suggest using https://remix.run. They offer a react experience but forces you into a typical server-first mental model.

Or just learn Node and how to do things the node only way. Basic html forms. Cookies. Security involving forms. Database access. Rendering html with templates. These are basics that get so abstracted over by the modern web dev frameworks that it’s not surprised you’re distracted by something like react hooks.