The chaos of React in larger web apps: has anyone experienced it differently?

Same experience for me.

I'm a TS/JS expert and have been writing JS for 25 years. I have never had as much trouble with inheriting bad code as I have with React, especially after Hooks. It's absolutely insane. It's worse than PHP ever was because at least PHP had no transpilation, tree-shaking, packaging system, or source maps that could go wrong.

I remember an issue where your code would break if certain unrelated lines of code were in the wrong order (despite being semantically identical in JS), but there was no warning or error at the time. I forget the details now, but it was so frustrating that I gave up on React for new projects.