React was always a black box, more or less. To me, what happened was the React team decided boilerplate was worse than cognitive load and the appearance of simplicity, and changed the framework accordingly.

Class components are easy to understand and reason about (mostly) - but they result in a lot of boilerplate code for simple functionality and event handling. Hooks, to me, are the opposite. They have all kinds of limitations and footguns which you need to be aware of (yes linters help) but they give the code a much cleaner appearance.

I personally prefer obvious boilerplate over clean aesthetics but I know lots of people who prefer hooks. I've sinced moved to Preact and have not missed real React once.