I can objectively prove that React devs themselves have at the very least changed how they understand hooks but more likely have been making it up as they’ve gone along. The best example is one of the more problematic hooks, useEffect.
Here’s how useEffect is described in the old documentation:
https://legacy.reactjs.org/docs/hooks-effect.html
> The Effect Hook lets you perform side effects in function components
Here’s how the new docs explain useEffect:
> useEffect is a React Hook that lets you synchronize a component with an external system.
These are dramatically different claims about what useEffect is supposed to be for. Dig a little deeper and Reaft developers will now explicitly tell you to not use useEffects for side effects, which again is the opposite of what they explained it to be.
The same change in how they’re actually supposed to be used has been true across all the books to a lesser or greater degree.
Maybe React has finally stabilized and it’s easier for new devs because they’re learning the more stabilized version. However, I suspect it’s easy because they just happen to be within the same cycle of understanding in React. Much like how React was easy for devs coming to it nearly a decade ago, until the devs changed everything about it. New devs may just not be deep enough into the new cycle to experience the pain of all your understanding being wrong.
Now, to be completely clear, I have no problem with the changes. I think change is good and I have successfully worked with languages where the change has been even more dramatic than React.
The difference with React, I’ve increasingly come to realize, is that the developers will make radical changes in how they understand it to work, while still gaslighting you that nothing really has changed.
Hence the massive effort they made to convince everyone that hooks were just a different approach as classes and they both would be first class citizens forever, when they first introduced hooks, only to subtly and quietly change the narrative to hooks being the future of Reaft and recommending hooks.
They make these shifts all over the place without ever announcing it and convincing you to believe that what they’re saying today has always been the case.
More honesty towards how they’re changing React and what those changes mean would have gone a long way to reduce the absolute confusion floating around the react world.