I really disagree with this, plus I have to say, it doesn't sound like you are offering an alternative.
1. Escape hatches are good. Designing an API is hard, and supporting every use case within that API is harder. Providing a way to make sure you don't get backed into a corner means you can continue building things.
2. State updates -> View updates seems perfectly reasonable to me. I don't think I've ever wanted a view to use a stale piece of state in one section and an up-to-date piece of state in another.
3. Reconciliation is just React's way of saying "we are trying to make things fast." I generally don't have to worry about how this happens while I'm building things: I can just build things. A library that let's me focus on business logic rather than boilerplate or implementation details is one that I want to continue using.
4. "Thinking in React" I put into two buckets: The first is easier to grasp, in how to reason about state (propagating down in one direction) and how to keep things in "React" land (don't manipulate the DOM directly, React won't "know" about it). The 2nd is in the API, and I'll admit does take some time to get used to. Lifecycle methods I think can be learned faster, but knowing the lifecycles around hooks also can be learned, of course. Plus, the abstraction and co-location benefits of hooks outweigh the learning curve IMO.
5. The [rules of hooks][1] that React provides is just two items, hardly overwhelming. The actual API of hooks (e.g. the need for a dependency array, return function from useEffect to cleanup on unmount, etc.) is larger and takes longer to fully grasp, but being able to have a linter catch a large chunk of these is a good thing in my book. Plus, no library is without its footguns. In the jQuery days there were plenty of times I'd forget to remove a listener, create race conditions in ajax stuff, etc. Learning a library's API is just that, its API. You are writing in Javascript, but of course no one is saying "the idea of dependency arrays is 'Javascript,'" although that concept definitely appears in other computer science / programming fields.
[1]: https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-rules.html