Personally, I don't find it any more concerning that many software engineers with extensive professional web development experience had such a difficult time understanding React when it came out. (It was universally ridiculed and dismissed for about a year after it came out.)
It's a different mental model. It doesn't "click" immediately for everyone but I've seen it "click" enough times for both beginners and experienced developers that I'm not worried about it.
I don't really remember there being much of a misunderstanding of React itself when it was first launched. There was definitely ridicule ("markup and logic in the same file?!"), but the general idea behind the core of it is pretty straightforward. I could be misremembering, it has been several years after all.
And I'm optimistic that hooks will be great and they won't be difficult to teach to React newcomers and more junior team members. But it's not obvious to me yet that it's the case and I'll be careful about how I use the feature going forward
Thanks for all your contributions to the community, though. Not trying to be overly critical of all the hard work — just trying to fully understand use cases, maintainability implications, etc.
It's a different mental model. It doesn't "click" immediately for everyone but I've seen it "click" enough times for both beginners and experienced developers that I'm not worried about it.