Can you provide links to articles where react devs detail the scaling issues?
I've found HOCs easy to combine and reason about if I name them carefully, and am still using them on personal projects. When people complain about HOCs not scaling well, are they primarily complaining about name collisions, or performance issues due to deeply nested components/lots of render calls?
It's primarily about naming collisions and indirection.
I covered some of the tradeoffs in this post and talk:
https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/07/blogged-answers-th...
https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/09/presentation-hooks...
The useEffect pretty much provides a direct replacement for componentDidMount/componentWillUnmount.
I'm still on the fence, but so far it seems to me that using hooks makes my intent clearer than using the various lifecycle methods.