React is primarily for intimidating the piss out of new employees and flexing on your teammates with esoteric hooks and composables. In essence, React is the job security framework.
Hooks came as no surprise to anyone who paid attention, as the recommended way to write components since at least 2016 was in the stateless functional style whenever possible, and many of us used recompose[1] to simulate hooks long before their introduction.
[0] https://github.com/reactiflux/q-and-a/blob/master/jordan-wal...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190105060636/https://reactjs.o...
Although they were mentioning function components at the time in the documentation, I can't say how mainstream that was. Hooks were introduced in Feb. 2019.