Comment by paulddraper

Hooks are IMO one of the greatest innovations in UI programming.

I'll draw an analogy.

---

Why did async/await replace callbacks? They are really the same thing, aren't they? Aren't callbacks good enough?

Async/await allowed programmers to write asynchronous code as if it were synchronous.

---

Why did hooks replace classes/imperative? They are really the same thing, aren't they? Aren't classes/imperative good enough?

Hooks allowed programmers to write stateful code as if it were stateless.

    function MyComponent() {
      const [value, setValue] = useState(false);

      const buttonClass = value ? "on" : "off";

      return (
        <button
          className={buttonClass}
          onClick={() => setValue(!value)}
        >
          {String(value)}
        </button>
      );
    }

This is functional code, without scary, hard-to-reason side-effects. Except for one limited part, which operates in a stateful way.

I argue that this is simpler than the equivalent imperative-DOM modification code, and the gap between these only increases with real programs.

This isn't just a weird "web bro" thing; the hooks paradigm is useful (in theory and practice) to every UI platform.

I even wrote an implementation (closed source) for hooks in Angular. It was lovely.