I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, it's a function plus a magically injected context that is accessed through hooks which requires all kinds of guarantees that you have to be aware of otherwise it will have hard to debug consequences. Imo it's anything but elegant. I did projects in all major frameworks and am building a huge angular web app currently. In angular a component is represented as a class plus template (plus styles). A event listener is mostly calling a method on the class. A state can be as simple as a property on the class. It's very natural and there are way less caveats (although not zero).

Maybe you would prefer React's class-based syntax. It's still there if you want to use it