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I like React Hooks, I like the simplicity. I dislike that it makes reading the code much more difficult. The code required to do a simple "componentDidMount()" is very abstract. It is difficult to reason about what a component does at first glance, with the class methods this is much easier.

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To do 'componentDidMount' you simply need a 'useEffect' with an empty (non-null) dependency array. It makes sense to me - maybe the issue is more familiarity than simplicity?

Edit: useEffect performs a side effect every time one of it's dependencies has changed value. Passing an empty array means the effect is only run once (on mount) because there are no dependencies.

class components have a huge downside in that `this` is mutable. Hooks solve this problem, and this problem seems to have motivated their creation to some extent. This blog post goes into more detail: https://overreacted.io/how-are-function-components-different...

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