The fact that it’s unintuitive and different is why hooks are a joke. Class components just make sense.
Hooks help me avoid that pain. But is the API perfect? Nope.
Again, this isn't 'American Idol for frameworks'; I'm not picking React because I think it's the best, or even better. I'm picking React because of the habitat, and because that habitat is now, in a sense, my hometown.
It's the same reason why I non-ironically recommend Wordpress to a lot of people that have super limited budgets and want the moon.
I do enjoy trying all the different new approaches to UI development though, especially as I'm not a frontend developer so most of the time I write frontend code I'm building either internal tools or personal projects, so I get to experiment a lot.