It's weird to me that React hooks are always dragged out in these arguments as some kind of bogeyman. If you understand the idea of a virtual DOM and a render loop, then it is only a tiny step from there to understand hooks. And you can understand all of these concepts in about 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VVfMVQabx0
I just don't get all the hand wringing regarding frontend frameworks. I've been using React since 2014 and in 10 years, there has been exactly one big change to the framework: hooks. When they came out, I spent 15 minutes to understand them. It didn't kill me.
And React has been undisputed king the frontend frameworks hill for at least 9 years, but people still act like it's some sort of ever-changing, confusing landscape of options. If you want boring, stable front-end development, choose a super popular, well documented tool like React. Or if you don't like frameworks, use vanilla JS. It's not a crisis.