To put that in context: that was at the time ES was starting to introduce OO abstractions to the spec. and it was somewhat trendy to go in that direction. I never got the impression that the React guys were heavily invested in that paradigm, and they definitely moved away from it very quickly after first encouraging it in their API. Everyone makes mistakes.
As a side-note: I think class abstractions in ES are a feature that in retrospect is less of a great idea now than it may have seemed at the time. ES class abstractions obscure their own subtle issues (in a very similar way to the article's fake Twitter screenshot jokes about React hooks).
- From 2008-2014, _everyone_ was writing their own "class-like" abstractions (see: Backbone, Class.js, five million other "inheritance" libs). So, the React team wrote `createClass` as their own implementation.
- When ES6 classes came out, the React team took that as an opportunity to drop maintaining their own abstraction and switch to something that was actually standardized, and reduce the amount of magic behavior (auto-binding, mixins, etc).
- Function components came out in React 0.14, and were initially limited to just rendering based on props - no state or effects possible
- Hooks now give function components the ability to have state and effects. In addition, encouraging a move away from classes dovetails into the React team's long-term plans for the React APIs.
The class abstractions added to ES spec. didn't happen in a vacuum; it was very much on the back of community demand. Backbone especially had an outsized influence.
Perhaps that was a necessary step toward realising tools to solve problems without those abstractions, I don't know.
What makes this point tricky is that React did initially introduce their library with OO concepts for years.