Never understood this posts. React as a whole and state management became many times easier over the years (been working with it, vue and a bit of angular for 6+ years now).

Function components removed stuff like getDerivedStateFromProps and many other things, introduced clear and simple way of component updating (as in "prop reference changed, I'm gonna render now").

For state we got redux toolkit, which simplified reducers, zustand and recoil/jotai and mobx which allow you to pick based on your needs instead of writing million reducers or passing state to children when you don't really need it.

Its not "react got hard", its people unable to adapt to changing world. Every mainstream framework in reality got streamlined, simpler and more effecient to create apps.