Front end development doesn't have to be awful, particularly with how much JavaScript the language has improved alongside browser APIs. React made sense at one point because the abstractions it employed were common in other contexts: lifecycle events (intentionally avoiding the "hook" word here) are present pretty much everywhere in programming abstractions (on initialization, on deinitialization, on update, and so forth). These were aptly named "onComponentThing"s and grokable.

Hooks, and particularly useEffect, ruined it for me. I have given up trying to understand why changing button states or presenting modals has become so obtuse and frustrating. I don't care about updating my react-router and rewriting it again for the third or fourth or whatever time. I don't want another new testing library, another new "best practice", or another repeated mistake in the reinventing-the-wheel-cycle the React community seems obsessed with.

It's all so exhausting. I write Rails now with erb templates and some dumb javascript to toggle modals and change button colours. It's not cool but at least I can understand it six months later.