That’s true. Just to note, I never claimed otherwise. See, useEffect is an evil remark. This is more based on my experience working with an average React codebase.

As for your question, “Why does everyone suddenly try to use it for spreading butter or peeling eggs?”

I guess part of the reason is that many people rely on older tutorials and patterns where the usage of useEffect was much more tolerated or even encouraged as a catch-all solution. There’s still a lot of inertia from the old componentDidThis/componentDidThat paradigm, with useEffect being its direct replacement.

I feel it is only a recent tendency to finally abandon the overuse of effect hooks.

Just open an average Stack Overflow React question, and you’ll see how many useEffects are crammed in there.