Agree with you on that. React was a breath of fresh air compared to what we had in the before-times, such as Angular, Ember and so on. The canonical demo of Ember.js was two-way data binding. React did away with two-way data binding and introduced JSX syntax. This was a major step forward. Code suddenly looked sane and readable. Then they took two steps backward when they introduced hooks. Code went back to being unreadable.