I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React. Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.
I overall agree. I use functional style programming a lot but for some reason hooks have always confused me. The component classes generally make sense to me and map onto other paradigms like flutter, vue, etc. Sure methods like componentDidMount are a mouthful but I found it much more explicit
In my view, hooks are more about managing state dependencies, rather than functional programming, per se. So they're more useful for simplifying methods like componentDidUpdate, rather than componentDidMount. When you need to detect changes by comparing prevProps to this.props or prevState to this.state, the logic can quickly get really ugly. Instead you can just put the relevant prop or state you want to monitor in the dependency list of a hook, and it will be triggered whenever that dependency list changes.