Chances are you aren’t materially smarter than the hoards of smart people doing this day-to-day and find it ‘not-easy-mode’, and that you’re instead in deep Dunning-Kruger territory.
You watched the VHS about foundation repair but you’re yet to get thrown off-course when you find out that you don’t know what carbon-fibre stucco lath is.
I'm sure React has it's own intricacies just like every other tool and it takes time to appreciate those. I can see how managing your reconciliation state can become a big hurdle in larger projects for example. I've done WPF, MFC and a lot of other things on native desktop programming and the ideas in React are not that different. Those ideas in the browser context are actually easier to deal with than on a native platform hence my "easy mode" thought.
I've been a fan for several years now, almost a decade and I adopted the hooks relatively early on as well. It feels right, even if something under the covers are complex, you don't have to think about a lot of that when you aren't looking at it.
Like yourself I also prefer written docs, but trying to find such structured info was an exercise in futility. At the end I used my existing Pluralsight subscription and went through the React 18 path they have which is around 18 hours or so in total. The courses covered different topics around React like components, hooks, testing etc. Good thing is the courses also have full transcripts! I followed them along and created some small apps myself in the process. Now I'm pretty much sure I can handle working with React in a normal job setting. You might want to consider that option. To be honest FE seems like programming on easy mode compared to some of the things I'm used to working on in my day to day. If you are an experienced programmer you should have no problem getting caught up to speed on that relatively quickly.