(disclaimer: mithril author here)
The point of an abstraction is to create a "black box" of sorts around some primitive. I think all it boils down to with what the author is saying is that the React team is changing how things work under the abstraction, and therefore some assumptions people made about leaked semantics are no longer true.
Mithril rendering semantics have always been more or less this: on an event, redraw everything. React semantics started that way too, but now there are a whole lot of other semantics under the hood (for example, the rule of hooks provides some semantic guarantees that enable a hot reload implementation to be more robust). Concurrent mode is another example of semantics that benefit from rule of hooks guarantees.
I think when I see people complain about the rule of hooks is that there's a dissonance between the strict semantics of hooks and the expectations of what the semantics should be (for some definition of "should", usually related to ability to reason about stuff in some specific way)
I'd say that overlapping several different compatible underlying functional semantics under one umbrella of very strict API semantics is an interesting and somewhat novel approach to supporting some cool infrastructure (i.e. ability to do deep hot reloading stuff, animate in IoT devices in a renderer-agnostic way, React Native, granular reactivity via memo, and the list goes on). Where I think React missed the ball a bit is that the API semantics don't always feel ergonomic for the use case they're meant to serve (for example, I've seen a few occasions where nested hooks ended up w/ long code review threads debating obscure minutiae)
When I see people praise Svelte, I think the reason is similar: since it doesn't need to artificially create constraints to support every use case under the sun, its API semantics are able to align very closely to people's expectations.