Maybe I’m just being pedantic here, but I think how you use words matters, and in this instance a better title would be “avoid unnecessary useEffect calls” or something like that. “You might not need an effect” is just poor (sloppy?) wording, because it’s usually objectively wrong.
The reason it matters in this instance is that with the current title I’m going into the article thinking I’ll learn some new way to do effects which is better than useEffect. But the article offers no alternative to useEffect. You will need useEffect.
I think the context is “for this use case”. Neither are saying never use Redux or useEffect, but are more about the common problem of people reaching for solutions that aren’t a good fit for their problem.
When I have seen useEffect used, it's most often uneccesary. People are using it to create dependent state (ie. when x changes, then recalculate y) or to handle the result of an event.
It's really only needed in components that handle fetch responses, which IME is much fewer than 99.9%.
Everything else is triggered by event handlers. I work on a 70Loc react app and useEffect is used maybe once outside of this context. You really don't need it.
And I don't know what you mean by "listening to browser events" with useEffect. You really just need to use onClick and onChange.
You also don't need it to set state, you need calculated constant assignments.