> Developer time is spent managing re-renders, effect dependencies, and hydration boundaries

You might be, I am not! All my react apps for work in the last ten years I’ve spent little time doing this. The occasional useMemo and relatively intelligent splitting of components is all you need. I don’t even know what “hydration boundaries” are; sounds more like a next.js thing than a react thing. Why is everyone pulling in frameworks that do a bunch of SSR nonsense for B2B apps I just don’t know - but that’s a conscious choice and is not fundamental to react itself.

That’s great for you (though it reads like a brag), but a lot of devs - even seasoned ones - have had to fight against unwanted re renders and the sharp edges of effect, hence the quite common complaints about those