I think hooks aren't really making React more of a black box, but just that it's invalidating a lot of people's incorrect mental models on how React works. (It's like C's undefined behaviors in that sense.) And the reason why a lot of people have these incorrect mental models is that React is a very thick abstraction.
For a long, long time, I thought that to provide the values that React brings, the UI framework being a black box is inevitable. Almost all React-esque libraries including but not limited to React, Preact, Mithril felt like a very thick abstraction over the DOM APIs.
But then I saw Crank.js[0], and that felt very intuitive and a thin abstraction, while retaining the good parts of React-esque libraries. I don't really know why it feels like that - I'm guessing it's because it uses native JS features that you already have a good understanding instead of some magic that happens in the React runtime.
I'm very looking forward to it, and I would like to urge everyone to try out Crank.js if you feel that React is now not intuitive enough.
[0] https://crank.js.org
For a long, long time, I thought that to provide the values that React brings, the UI framework being a black box is inevitable. Almost all React-esque libraries including but not limited to React, Preact, Mithril felt like a very thick abstraction over the DOM APIs.
But then I saw Crank.js[0], and that felt very intuitive and a thin abstraction, while retaining the good parts of React-esque libraries. I don't really know why it feels like that - I'm guessing it's because it uses native JS features that you already have a good understanding instead of some magic that happens in the React runtime.
I'm very looking forward to it, and I would like to urge everyone to try out Crank.js if you feel that React is now not intuitive enough.
[0] https://crank.js.org