> evolved to be a very functional approach

Is this actually advantageous though over class components? The creator of React said he thought moving to functional components would make it harder for people to learn.

I've found that sometimes hooks can make things less flexible, more verbose, more error prone, and harder to reason about. Sometimes a class might have made things easier to understand.

I loved the fact that `useEffect` could modularize code that was otherwise split between `componentDidMount/Unmount/Update`...but couldn't a new class API also have solved this.

Maybe I just need to read the docs again to remind me. I'm all in for hooks, but it's rare that I think about what life could have been like if we kept class components.