To say that you never have to think about those considerations in Svelte is pretty unfair - reactive declarations/statements are functionally equivalent to hooks, and they also carry a somewhat nonintuitive cognitive load until you've begun to "think in reactivity". It's also worth considering that hooks, while unintuitive in function, do use intuitive, non-magical syntax (unlike Svelte's reactive syntax). FWIW I like both, I just think they're both equally unintuitive until you make the mental connection.

I guess we're all different, but I've never had to think much about reactivity in Svelte.

Most of it can be explained in a HN comment:

Component state just does its thing. You change it with = and the component is re-rendered.

Writable stores need to trigger changes with set() and you need to use $ whenever you reference it in a .svelte file so that Svelte handles subscription automatically.

Reactive statements $: are a bit more complex. Every variable inside those is referenced by the compiler so that it knows when you are mutating it. Either with = or if it's a writable store with set().

I have to agree. I still haven’t used hooks yet and I’m sure I’ll get used to them when I do, but by comparison to this article Svelte is a breath of fresh air. It’s simple, it works. A lot of people object to it because it’s very different to React, but judging by the diagrams in the mental models here I don’t think that’s any bad thing.

An aside, and I know complaints about hooks are very boring now, but I remember when React first arrived on the scene. The API was a delight. shouldComponentUpdate, willReceiveProps, etc. Everything was so clear from the first second you picked it up. Now? I’m less sure.

I like Svelte a lot, but there’s definitely cognitive load when dealing with reactivity. In React, it’s top-down dataflow, which is generally easy to reason about.

I prefer the functional programming approach of React, but I love the performance and some of the developer ergonomics of Svelte.

You don't have to use two way binding binding in Svelte. You can bind to change events just like in React and update your reactive variables directly. The primary downside is enforcing it in the code everyone else on your team writes.