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It's stored internally in React. The instance of your component does not hold the state, just a reference to the state object which is repopulated each render (just like useState, it's the exact same mechanism), and after the render is done, the instance is destroyed.

More here: https://reactjs.org/blog/2015/12/18/react-components-element...

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The instance of the class isn’t destroyed every render... you can keep other state on it too that is persisted between renders, changing it just won’t trigger a render.

You are right. I tried it here, for others: https://codesandbox.io/s/crazy-bush-cg2i0?file=/src/App.js

Sure that is the way it works now. Is that a guarantee of React though or implicit behavior that could change in the future?

It's just an implementation detail.

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