[kybishop]

Have you seen the ReactConf talk on hooks? [1] It's absolutely worth the watch, even if you're somewhat familiar with hooks. They go through the pitfalls of class-based components and how hooks solve them.

It more-or-less boils down to: 1. class-based components force your lifecycle logic to live in disparate locations. 2. Class-based hooks are obtuse with hidden gotchas whereas pure functions tell you exactly what they're doing. 3. A whole class of unergenomic solutions disappears when you use hooks.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpw9EHDh2bM

[csande17]

I'd argue that hooks didn't really make anything better, they just replaced the pitfalls with different obtuse pitfalls and unergonomic solutions.

Hooks have their share of weird issues; they explode if they're called in a different order/number from how they were called the first time the component rendered (making them not at all pure functions), and it's super easy to screw up the dependency array to useMemo/useCallback (so either your hook is useless and re-installs the event handler on every render, or you get stupid "the callback had a stale copy of the state" bugs not possible with class-components).

I've also seen my fair share of situations where what would have been a this.setState with a callback becomes a tangled mess of useStates and useEffects, or someone bends over backwards to try and avoid re-installing an event handler every time one of the props or state variables it uses changes.

[aidos]

I feel of all the arguments against hooks, the whole “order of hooks” thing is the thinnest. You just learn about it and then it’s not a problem again.

I definitely get that there are some more complex cases where you have to jump through a couple of useRef hoops to do what you need. On balance though, I think the way the behaviour becomes declarative is worth the trade off.