Hooks were nice when they came out, but woefully under-documented. The fact that decent docs for hooks first development came out literally just this year when hooks have been out for years is kind of a shame.
As opposed to useEffect, most other hooks are fairly straightforward, but the fact it years of articles upon articles of mistakes and documentation to explain useEffect to both experienced and non-experienced devs alike shows that it really wasn't that great of an API for end users.
In fact the most common topic nowadays is how much you need to avoid useEffect, especially if you're not a library developer. None of this was documented/mentioned when it first came out.
Yes it does enable powerful workflows, but plenty of other frameworks/libraries handle the same thing in a nice way with much less drawbacks than react. (ex: automatic dependency tracking, etc)
The number of times I have to tell people to stop putting things in effects at all, or that the reason something isn't working is a stale callback due to missing dependencies in my opinion shows that its not really a good API for the average dev to be using.