I first tried react rigtt as it was shifting from class-based to functional components. I actually really liked the functional approach at first, but to me the promise was just pass in props and spit out html. No async components, no hooks, no data fetching, at best it just needs a way to attach even listeners once that fire custom events.
With all business logic outside the render tree it makes a ton of sense and really can be understood extremely fast. Props in, events out. Done. Today everything is a component, and components even have to understand whether they are in the server or browser and how to manage that handoff. It's such a massive dumpster fire of convention-as-a-solution.
I think that JSX support is a genius thing. Especially with modern TypeScript. I spent so many hours because of string-typed templates that I really value templates integrated within a language.
I really liked original React version with classes. It had its rough edges, but it was simple and accessible to me.
Modern React with functions is not simple. It's so far from simple. I consider myself pretty talented developer. But those hooks - I think last time I had to spend that amount of time is when I learned Scheme continuations. That thing really broke my mind. Well, hooks didn't break my mind, but they just seems to be very easy on the surface yet very hard below surface. I read plenty of articles yet I still don't fully understand them (although I think that at least I can use them without bugs).
For me React is like ORM. It's very powerful tool. I allows to tremendously cut the development time. But it requires absolutely expert knowledge on the team. And it looks so deceptively simple at the same time. This is a bad place for technology to be in.