[hrisng]

There's nothing stopping you from using class component as opposed to the new functional component though. It works completely fine, as it ever was, and in fact, I know a lot of teams are still using it. The API on that front is indeed surprisingly stable. Furthermore, there haven't been any shiny new thing since hooks, and it starting to feel like boring old tech. It's not the cool kid on the block anymore.

[Silhouette]

There's nothing stopping you from doing it, but part of the reason a library like React achieves such widespread use is the ecosystem that builds up around it, and if everyone else is using hooks to expose whatever functionality they're building, you are now excluded from the benefits of all of that work.

[nicoburns]

Well sure, if you don't adopt the new technology then you don't get the benefits of the new technology. But that's true it literally every ecosystem. If you don't upgrade to a C11 compiler, then you can't use libraries using C11 features either.

But in both cases, there's little reason not to upgrade because your old code will still work fine on the new version. And indeed you're free to continue writing new code in the "old" style. Adding additional API surface after 3 years while continuing to maintain and support the old API is hardly unstable!