It is bonkers. My number of "accidental" re renders on react are greater than before hooks.

Before at least I knew what was called on boostrap moments. Now everything is run as a side effect when any dependency change. My needs on checking if a prop or a dependency has changed hasn't evolved at all. I just have the core of my side effects on useEffect.

It sounds bonkers, but one of the reasons I pushed for moving my company’s app to React was because the useState hook reminded me of Reagent’s ratoms. I believe that was at least part of their intent. The catch is that you can’t really enforce immutability or atomic updates in plain JS, so they built hooks into the library as a workaround.

There’s not much of a cognitive difference between “defining a reagent component which uses ratoms and calls a pure function that derefs, updates or swaps them”, and “defining a react functional component that uses hooks”. It looks weird to have the “atoms” inside the render function instead of outside, and there are the aforementioned limitations (“the rules of hooks”), but it’s a compromise to get the feature into JS React in a consistent, performant manner.

I’d love to use CLJS/Reagent or even go full re-frame on our front-end codebase, but that’s a hard sell at my company since I’m the only dev who’s ever played with Clojure.

It's sort of what happens when OOP is demonized for years and FP is lionized. They've created what are effectively classes but with implicitly auto-generated private property names and a lot of weird edge cases where things can go pear shaped. But hey, it's functional and 'new' so it's good, right?

In fairness, the JS world has never had well engineered OOP GUI toolkits like you find in the desktop space. If you've never used JavaFX then ReactJS probably seems pretty magical. If you have, then, well ...

I don't know why Clojurescript's Reagent/re-frame aren't more popular given that they completely obviate the need for hooks or classes.