That sort of absolutist logic will never allow a framework to progress and become better. Sometimes good ideas come around (IMO like hooks) that are worth increasing the API surface area for.

I for one loathe using class components now and not being able to share logic compositionally via hooks when I work with them. I feel more productive and I feel like my components are smaller and more focused, and I don’t repeat myself as much. It’s been a net win for me, and I think it’s well worth having two supported APIs that do roughly the same thing.. because despite this, React is still a small and focused library API-wise.

They've increase the surface to reduce it over time, if that makes sense. Hooks are much more natural, simplistic way to write stateful components.