I looked up a few courses because I was under the impression that React is the most popular out of all the front end frameworks, and got into it. Took a while to get a hang of it, and as you said, learned to do most of the things using their documentation that pushed the class-component approach, and like 3 days after that, React came out with the hooks update and began its gradual shift away from class based components, so my initial knowledge turned next to useless if I wanted to keep up. 

Then I had to relearn things using a mix of their official docs and third party guides because their docs are, at times, unintuitive to follow, and the hooks update docs had some expectation that you were already familiar with all-things-React to fully understand it. Very overwhelming and hard to grasp beginner experience all in all.
Could never really wrap my head around why the verbosity and complexity of these seemingly basic things (onMount, state management...) was necessary, I felt like it was a downgrade when they introduced these changes and new standards. 

Reading their documents, it feels like they're switching stances throughout this project's lifespan constantly, like they don't know what they wanna achieve with it, and clearly don't know the most optimal way to do it either.  It tries to both provide liberty of development, but at the same time, wants to be opinionated about it, so which is it?

Having to pass around callbacks for whatever you wanna do, use unintuitive imposed method names, try to learn and upgrade on third party codes which are difficult to read even though some of them are explicitly written in the most compact way possible in JS, due to, what I can only describe as - a desperate attempt from these developers to compact the code visually to the point where their components don't look monstrous (lengthwise). I mean, minimized arrow funcs, reducers for days, maps of maps, ternaries within ternaries, all packed into these weird components that half of the time barely look like human written code anymore. 

Someone pointed out I should check Redux for state management, and at that point I was looking at another 1.5 HOUR video on how to work with Redux. Finished a project in React and went looking for an alternative in hopes that the front-end framework landscape can not be this convoluted, there had to be a better way. Voila, every other framework I tried was an improvement upon improvement (Angular, Vue2 (now 3), Svelte). 

In my limited and terrible experience with React, it's an over-engineered and convoluted pot of spaghetti produced by none other than Facebook, a company whose flagship app which is a glorified dashboard/news feed, has shitter practical performance than having multiple Adobe projects opened simultaneously with dozens of resources loaded. I am atm using Svelte and loving it, I rewrote that entire project in Svelte in 3 days and now it reads better and performs better too. Good riddance

You’re absolutly right, React is freakin ugly. I just need to learn it … very hard if you don‘t know the over engineered concepts. I like your videos, hope to see more eye opening stuff from you in the future because you‘re so talented explaining complicated things. Even if this is an anti-react video it helped me to understand some more react internal concepts, great content. 

React is basically a project that started off in an object oriented fashion, which received negativity, so they converted to function components, and now they are tacking on hacks such as useState, useEffect, etc., to provide everything that the classes could provide.