I think they're better off as a separate library (similar to react-transition-group), as someone else has suggested in the comments. There's certain cases where they come in handy, I understand this, but they didn't need to be baked into React.
I really dislike the way they can be abused to litter state and side effects all over React code so easily (e.g. hiding it layers deep in helper functions). And I feel they've made the API worse, such as `this` being replaced with the more clumsy `useRef`, or requiring an empty array to change the behavior of `useEffect`. These are things that break the Principal of Least Astonishment and have consequently led to countless blog posts that try to explain how to do things that were much more straight forward without hooks.
It's certainly faster to write once you get the hang of it but I don't think it's easier to understand. People seem to converge on multiple useEffect's with anonymous functions with non obvious scope for variables, empty arrays to designate behaviour that isn't obvious, lots of subtle async gotchas, stale state variables, etc.
They certainly work when you memorise the rules and syntax, but it feels very contrived even when it all makes sense.
> empty arrays to designate behaviour that isn't obvious
This drives me a little crazy too. That behaviour can be easily documented by wrapping it in a function with a name that makes sense, but people litter their React code with non-obvious hooks everywhere. You can reduce a lot of boilerplate (why are you writing empty arrays everywhere!?) and improve readability substantially by wrapping the hooks in more composed and idiomatic functions.
I think that was along the lines of what was intended for hooks, but I don't see it often.
I really dislike the way they can be abused to litter state and side effects all over React code so easily (e.g. hiding it layers deep in helper functions). And I feel they've made the API worse, such as `this` being replaced with the more clumsy `useRef`, or requiring an empty array to change the behavior of `useEffect`. These are things that break the Principal of Least Astonishment and have consequently led to countless blog posts that try to explain how to do things that were much more straight forward without hooks.
I've written about hooks before in past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357068
It's been a couple of years since they've been added, and I don't feel the ecosystem has improved because of it. So to me it was a mistake.
I know they will likely not be removed from React, so what I said was more tongue-in-cheek.