So... useState? :)
Of course then I got to thinking about how I'd answer the question "How can I put make that useState value accessible at different points in the component tree?" and the answer was "Make a new context with createContext and wrap the context provider in a component which provides the state and write a hook to easily consume the context within a child component" and, yeah, that's not exactly a frictionless dev experience.
FWIW for simple state management in React I've heard lots of good things about zustand: https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand
It's really quite simple and elegant. Svelte's model would likely be more complex tbh.
At least the React ecosystem as a whole seems to have broken free from the delusion that Redux is the be-all-end-all of state management. Those were dark days.
Prop drilling in Svelte is exactly the same complexity.
useState() wouldn’t exist because Svelte doesn’t need a virtual DOM and the compiler takes care of reactivity (per the famous React vs Svelte meme).
Stores are way, way simpler than redux reflux whatever else.
State in Svelte goes in stores. State in react seems to go in one of eighteen different mechanisms, which all begin with a 45 minute video of the author’s opinions about the true nature of reactive programming, when all I want to do is store a string.