I explored using TSX in a non-React way and have been quite proud of my results [0]. I mostly understand hooks and I get why they went that direction, but I swapped hooks for RxJS Observables in my library. I know for some developers they are just as hard to "understand" as hooks, but no one has ever accused Observables of being "magic", at least. Observables end up looking like hooks in basic component examples, but then you can pull them out and reason with them very easily in "view models". In some ways my library feels more like the early days of React when React was just a library, but with some modern benefits.