> [React Context] was never meant to replace Redux, and as far as I know nobody from the React team has ever claimed something like that.

I think the conflation came more from the "community" than from the React team itself. Many people were (ab)using Redux for simple cases were Context would have been sufficient and, in the process, paying the price of having a lot of boilerplate related to writing anemic "reducers" whose only purpose was to store things on the global state, and eventually also paying the price of having a ball-of-mud of a global state where no-one could be sure of the dependencies between components, as anyone could be accessing anything on that big ball-of-mud. (Been there; not proud.)

So, when the Context API came along, with a much leaner API (no actions or reducers) and less "global-y" feel than Redux, people who were misusing the latter naturally saw the former as a good replacement