React is honestly how I used to write my code in jQuery too, for some pages that had a lot of state. Basically, just like in game dev, I had a render() function that I'd call at the end of the file that would re-render everything. The pattern itself is very easy to understand, re-rendering efficiently is the hard part, but for React users today, that's an implementation detail.

Hooks are also very interesting, they're basically functions that run at specific times, or that is to say, they're `f(...parameters, state)`. They hold state inside the function, sort of like a closure.