> My biggest worry with React is that it has restless developers with idle hands.

That’s exactly what I take hooks as a sign of. I read the papers and the code when they came out. I still don’t get why they exist except to provide churn to work on. A half-reimplementation of objects with a super weird syntax in a language that already has objects seems like misguided make-work on a project that’s already basically “done” except for the boring, non-flashy work of maintenance and subtler improvements.