Comment by WickyNilliams

Hooks are very much not normal functions though. They are a new "colour" of function much like async functions - they can only be called in components or other hooks, they cannot be called conditionally, cannot be called in loops etc. The so-called "rules of hooks"

(To get ahead of the common objection: of course it's still JavaScript by virtue of being implemented in JavaScript. But so are Svelte, Vue et all)