> The number of concepts you needed to learn started growing, and the old intuitiveness of React began to go away.

Oh sure, there's new things to learn. But hooks encapsulate & contain the complexity much better than they used to.

I can only laugh to myself at the idea at class-based React or HoC was some halcyon "intuitive" React era. What we have now can be basically read top-to-bottom, with much less needing to deeply know lifecycle implications & complections & puzzle out implications each time we go to understand how a thing is behaving.

> On top of that, there was a mad rush throughout the ecosystem to implement them, many times poorly, leading to more confusion.

Can we use them poorly? Sure. Did we rush to play with the new tech? Absolutely! My though, it's sad to see this portrayed as a negative, as a strike against: this is how we learn! Open-source is strengthened by diversity, by learning in the wide. Initial adoption will be chaotic, but that vast experience leads more quickly to a healthier better normalized set of end behaviors!

The historical precedent for software framework development is having controlled, restrained ecosystem growth largely by a software giant or elite team, who is responsible for making perfect choices that everyone is going to have to live with either forever or until everyone's sick of all the old mistakes & makes a brand new library (like the long long long sequence of Microsoft frameworks for native & web). React by contrast as kept being successful because it keeps distilling out small core central ideas, and letting the ecosystem explore and innovate at the frontier with those ideas. Cathedral vs Bazaar models.

There's a lot of people whose idea of control and order is to believe in top-down systems, to believe in only guided careful controlled evolution. But this isn't the open source way, and, in my view, that way always leads to fragility and weaknesses. Including too many batteries in your solution leads to ossification & stagnation. Robust, long-term, good answers emerge only over time, only with lots of practice. And we're in such a beautiful age, where peership matters, where we have taste & sensibility to discern out of the many examples put before us what looks right & what looks good. These are the strengths of our era, our ability to iterate forward.

And with React Hooks, I think we're quite decently into the adoption curve. It's 4 years down the road from their introduction (16.8, in February 2019). I have a hard time imagining having to stick with the old ways. The old code that our small org refactors & cleans up is awful by comparison, is much less clear to read, has complex HoC concerns that rebuffed & scared most people. Meanwhile I think the ecosystem has really grown a very sophisticated smart sense of how hooks can & should be built, and is doing really stellar works with incredibly advanced hooks, that span front & back end both, which I doubt would have been a feasible wide-scale target previously.

Where we are is better. With great possibility & progress comes upheaval, yes, but it'd be a shame to dread it. Our designs are imperfect, our architectures ever apt for iterations; that we can adapt forward with grace & on so many frontiers - while still ending up speaking the same core language - all at once is truly a modern marvel. I can't imagine any better paths that what we've done.