Best practises have changed dramatically in React since 2014 though. It’s easy to say “oh you don’t have to use hooks, you can keep using class components” but that’s not really true when the entire ecosystem is pivoting.

My bigger problem with React is that it ends up being used as a form of vendor lock in. Once your entire page is in the React VDOM it’s very, very difficult to pivot to a different framework piece by piece. That’s a core strength of web components.

I think React originally started with the opposite intent: a library where you can mount a component onto selected elements of the web page. The lock in only happened when React was used to develop SPAs, which effectively meant that React takes over the document root. With that came state management, and frameworks that managed the complexity of state were not far behind.