Your will be surprised how nicely a functional approach with hooks can improve your frontend architecture. Side effects are the source of all evil, it‘s quite useful to take special care.
I think the thing is that you're focused on this specific implementation detail of React. I just don't care. Not that you're not right, either! It's just a matter of competing interests.
I'm running two businesses with a third on the way. I have bigger problems than people reinventing stuff with no benefits compared to what we were doing 20 years ago.
I'm writing software every day, so I'm still involved in front-line work, but I'm interested in being the level of productive most people aren't.
So the bigger questions on my mind are things like, "What knowledge can I build up that doesn't become obsolete?" "What social effects drive adoption that endanger those goals?"
Those are questions that have, at least immediately, very little to do with implementation details, and are questions that help me navigate whether to ignore new technologies all together, or when I identify something new when I decide to adopt it.
A part of that is looking for cues from maintainers that say, "Hey, we care that you're shipping, and we're not going to endanger your labor spent learning our intellectual property."
